Although recall tasks have been widely used in many studies, there have been few attempts to examine the effect of a retrieval cue on recall production. In the present study, the effect of inferential cues on EFL learners' recall production was investigated. In the experiment, two types of sentences (i.e., explicit and implicit) were prepared and 129 Japanese university students read them, and then recalled the information using a cue. The results showed that proficient readers recalled significantly more information than less proficient readers, suggesting that the effect of inferential cues was influenced by EFL learners' L2 proficiency. In addition, the effect of the inferential cues varied according to the language of the cues (i.e., L1 or L2). That is, when the implicit cue was presented in the learners' native language (Japanese), its effect was almost the same as the effect of the explicit cue. On the other hand, when the implicit cue was presented in L2 (English), its effect was weaker than that of the explicit cue. Moreover, qualitative analysis was conducted from the perspective of the semantic relatedness of sentences. These results suggested that the function of inferential cues was influenced by complex factors such as EFL learners' L2 reading proficiency, the language of cues, and text contexts.
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