This study aims to investigate English as a foreign language (EFL) learners' use of context information under various noise conditions. The participants were seven Japanese undergraduate students. A noise test adopted from the Speech-Perception-in-Noise (SPIN) test (Kalikow et al., 1977) was used. Four signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) conditions (SNR =…

Lexical inference through reading is considered an important method for vocabulary building; however, empirical research has not consistently offered strong evidence of the application of lexical inference in second language vocabulary learning. A recently burgeoning line of research focuses on second language (L2) lexical inference of compounds…

Second language (L2) reading research suggests that successful reading comprehension usually involves a repertoire of strategies. Although Chinese is considered to be a challenging language for foreign language readers, thus far, few studies have investigated how strategies are orchestrated by readers of Chinese as a foreign language (CFL) to…

There is a general consensus among second-language (L2) researchers today that lexical inferencing (LIF) is among the most common techniques that L2 learners use to generate meaning for unknown words they encounter in context. Indeed, claims about the salience and pervasiveness of LIF for L2 learners rely heavily upon data obtained via concurrent…

Lexical inferencing is referred to as guessing the meaning of an unknown word using available linguistic and other clues. It is a primary lexical processing strategy to tackle unknown words while reading. This study aims to explore the clue use of Chinese EFL learners in inferring the meaning of unknown word in reading. Two types of introspective…

In recent years the study of second language (L2) vocabulary learning through reading has attracted much attention in the field of L2 acquisition. A specific area that has received wide interest is the examination of the processes involved in deriving word meanings from context. The purpose of the present study was to examine the relationships…

The present study investigated the effect of context on the strategies the EFL learners utilized to process idioms. To do so, ten Iranian intermediate EFL learners were randomly assigned to two groups who then attended a think-aloud session. The 5 subjects in the first group were exposed to an animated cartoon including 23 unfamiliar idioms while…

This paper reports a study in which Iranian EFL female students' think aloud protocols were analyzed to find out what knowledge sources informed them as they tried to make lexical inference when reading an English text. The study also intended to find out if students' level of their L2 proficiency would affect the pattern of their use of the…

To investigate the role of context in reading development, a comparison of reading comprehension and processes was conducted between learners of Japanese as a second language in study abroad (SA; n = 15) and intensive domestic (in the United States) immersion (IM; n = 15) contexts. A significant difference was found between contexts in pretest to…