This assumption is expressed in a number of psycholinguistic theories of vocabulary retention (e.g. Many second language researchers assume that deeper processing and more elaboration of lexical information will increase retention compared to less deep processing and less elaboration. As mentioned above, both dictionary consultation and lexical inferencing are rather popular, possibly because they are quite easily implemented. While learners use various VLS when reading a written text in the target language, some VLS seem to be more popular than others. Both lexical inferencing and dictionary consultation constitute determination strategies. Discovery strategies are further subdivided into determination strategies, which provide a set of limited choices to learn new words, and social strategies, which refer to the cooperation with others to learn new words. įollowing Schmitt’s VLS taxonomy, both lexical inferencing and dictionary consultation are discovery strategies, which are employed to learn new words, rather than consolidation strategies, which are employed to remember initially learned words. We focus on these two strategies because they are among the most frequently used as reported by learners and previous studies have yielded conflicting results in terms of the learning effect that both strategies yield. The current study focuses on two particular VLS: guessing the meaning of words from context (lexical inferencing) and looking words up in a bilingual dictionary (dictionary consultation). Catalan defined VLS as mechanisms that language learners typically apply to determine the meaning of unknown lexical items, retrieve them from long-term memory and apply them in verbal and written situations. The funders had no role in study design, data collection and analysis, decision to publish, or preparation of the manuscript.Ĭompeting interests: The authors have declared that no competing interests exist.Ī good number of foreign and second language learners adopt what is known as vocabulary learning strategies (VLS), either inside or outside of the classroom. The authors also acknowledge the financial support by the University of Graz.
įunding: The first author was funded by King Abdulaziz University, Kingdom of Saudi Arabia. This is an open access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited.ĭata Availability: The data and analysis scripts for RQ1 through RQ3 are available on the Open Science Framework at.
Received: DecemAccepted: JPublished: July 30, 2020Ĭopyright: © 2020 Alahmadi, Foltz. PLoS ONE 15(7):Įditor: Koji Miwa, Nagoya University, JAPAN Citation: Alahmadi A, Foltz A (2020) Exploring the effect of lexical inferencing and dictionary consultation on undergraduate EFL students’ vocabulary acquisition.
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