A Comparison of Inferencing and Meaning-guessing of New Lexicon in Context versus Non-context Vocabulary Presentation

In a quasi-experimental study, the researcher used two approaches to vocabulary instruction with 34 Level III College of Languages and Translation students, enrolled in King Khalid University, KSA. The purpose of the study was to explore the effects of each approach. One strategy emphasized direct teaching of the individual meanings for a set of unfamiliar words. The second strategy emphasized teaching students to derive word meaning from sentence context, rather than teaching specific meanings. Pre-test/post-test comparisons indicate that both approaches were effective in helping students acquire, retain and further recall the lexical items instructed. The findings were discussed in relation to prior research, and implications as well as suggestions for vocabulary building material development were given at the end of the paper. INTRODUCTION AND BACKGROUND Vocabulary acquisition, important as it is, has received scant attention in the international research agenda (Lawson & Hogben, 1996; Nation, 1993, 2001). However, research done in the skill areas asserts that effective communication is a function of adequate and appropriate vocabulary acquisition rather than the learning of grammar rules (Vermeer, 1992; Coady, 1993; Rott, 1999). Further, much of this research assigns successful communication in ESL/EFL to inferencing and meaning-guessing depending on the acquisition of the most frequently used vocabulary items in the English language; this vocabulary range has been estimated to be between 2000 to 3000 words (Bensoussan, 1979, 1983; Nation, 1993). In the English Department of the College of Languages and Translation at King Khalid University, students find it difficult to globally understand spoken or written discourse, most probably because they lack the ability to guess word meaning from context. Preliminary extrapolation implies that those students over-rely on word lists including the English lexicon on one column and Arabic equivalents on the other. Classroom observations also suggest that those students were encouraged to learn vocabulary using these EnglishArabic pairs in isolation since their early learning of the language which may have negatively affected their inferencing abilities. Inferencing has been defined as the connections that people establish when they try to interpret texts (Brown & Yule, 1983). It is appropriately related to global understanding of longer pieces of discourse in which context may exercise an influence in enabling comprehension. Therefore, inferencing and meaning-guessing are the product of