A study of verbal reasoning and EFL(English as a foreign language) vocabulary learning from a psycholinguistic perspective

Abstract

The present study examines the role of EFL (English as a Foreign Language) inference of technical words in promoting academic receptive vocabulary size. Moreover, it is interested in the linguistic processes involved in inferring terminology. To this end, an experiment was conducted, during the academic year 2013-2014, where two groups of third year female students are used: the first group serves as the control group while the second represents the experimental group. Both groups are tested for the vocabulary size (the dependent variable) using the 14 000 version of the Vocabulary Size Test (VST)/ 2013- 2014. Moreover, the participants’ lexical inference capacity (the independent variable) is rated from Cloze Procedure Format (CPF) activities that are administered almost weekly, during the year, by the end of the lectures in Psychology of Education. In every class, the students were assigned a text in the latter field and have to fill in the blanks using provided technical terms, learnt in the same lecture. The data were analyzed, after that, using the ttest. The results showed that EFL written receptive vocabulary size scores did not correspond to the scores obtained from the CPF tasks, while lexical inference has proved to be connected to technical vocabulary learning; semantic knowledge and background knowledge are the mostly used knowledge sources to guess the missing items in the texts. In addition, the students’ vocabulary size proves not to be enough to carry out adequate comprehension. Hence, further scrutiny on the knowledge sources involved in successful inference is required. Moreover, teaching vocabulary should be reinforced in lassrooms by encouraging extensive reading and inference, and using dictionaries and applications (technology) that might even be used outside the classroom, for better vocabulary growth.