Vocabulary Strategies in Reading: Verbal Reports of Good Comprehenders

For learners of English as a Foreign Language (EFL) in Indonesia, encountering unfamiliar words can be a major roadblock in reading comprehension, especially if they happen to be keywords in a particular text. To overcome the vocabulary problem, learners generally resort to a dictionary, hardly realizing that other strategies exist. The strategy of inferring word meaning from context, for instance, seems to be ineffectively used by the learners, as revealed in a preliminary study conducted by the author. The present study reports the actual strategy use of good readers when they face hindrance in the form of unfamiliar words. Eight undergraduates majoring in English at Surabaya State University performed think-aloud while reading two texts to find out how they coped with such difficulties. The verbal protocol indicates that half of the participants mainly relied on a bilingual (EnglishIndonesian) dictionary to attack unfamiliar words, and only one of them preferred to use a monolingual (English-English) one. Two of them employ context cues to infer the meaning of the words, while one participant combine the use of context cues and a monolingual dictionary as the major strategy. All but one participants skipped some of lexical items whose meaning was unknown to them, especially when these words did not have a key contribution to the meaning of the whole text.