How EFL Learners Process Unknown Words While Reading : Effects of Contextual Constraints and Recall Instructions

Abstract

This study examined how Japanese EFL learners process unknown words in a text while reading, with a focus on two factors: (a) contextual constraints, and (b) recall instructions of a contextual sentence. Thirty-eight undergraduates read 16 contextual sentences with target words in four conditions: strongly contextual constraints with or without a free-written recall task, and weakly contextual constraints with or without the same task. They then performed a plausible judgment task and a priming task to assess how they processed the words and whether the word information extracted from contexts were retained or not. The results showed that the strongly contextual constraints enabled the learners to predict the meanings of unknown words without any instructions of lexical inferencing; additionally, the recall task facilitated the identification of the meanings of unknown words even if they were weakly constrained. Interestingly, it is implied that the even weakiy contextual constraints might contribute to the immediate retention of identified meanings. These suggest that teachers should consider the interaction between contextual constraints and comprehension of given contexts, when requiring students of various proficiencies to learn vocabulary through reading.