A STUDY ON THE KNOWLEDGE SOURCES OF TURKISH EFL LEARNERS IN LEXICAL INFERENCING İlknur İSTİFÇİ Anadolu University Eskişehir, TURKEY Eskişehir, TURKEY

OUTLINE OF THE PRESENTATION A. Introduction B. Methodology C. Results D. Conclusions E. Implications

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Inferencing or guessing is a compensation strategy which enables learners to use the new language for either comprehension or production despite limitations in knowledge. This strategy involves using a wide variety of clues – linguistic or nonlinguistic – to guess the meaning (Oxford, 1990).

Guessing vocabulary from context is the most frequently used strategy in discovering the meaning of words. New words can best be learned when presented in texts and when their meaning is inferred from context by learners (Lawson & Hogben, 1996).

Good language learners, when confronted with unknown expressions, make educated guesses. On the other hand, less adept language learners often panic, tune out or grab the dictionary (Oxford, 1990).

The more advanced learners use context in order to decide the meaning of an unknown word, try to make guesses on the basis of what is familiar to them and they are more successful than low-ability learners (Carter, 1987; Kern, 1989).

AIM OF THE STUDY  to find the type of knowledge sources Lower Intermediate and Intermediate Level EFL students use in inferencing  to find similarities or differences between the students in two levels in terms of the use of knowledge sources

RESEARCH QUESTIONS 1. What type of knowledge sources do the learners in intermediate and low- intermediate levels use when they try to infer the meanings of unknown words? 2. Are there any similarities and differences between the students in these two levels in terms of correct guessing and the knowledge sources?

METHODOLOGY Academic Year Fall Term Foreign Language School, Anadolu University Participants  26 intermediate level students  25 low-intermediate level students (age range 18-22)

MATERIALS Four authentic reading passages  two of them were jokes  two of them were advertisements

DATA COLLECTION The students were given the passages one at a time in a four-week period. The students: scanned the passages and underlined unknown words.scanned the passages and underlined unknown words. tried to guess the meaning of unknown words.tried to guess the meaning of unknown words. wrote how they guessed the meanings of unknown words and what helped them to guess.wrote how they guessed the meanings of unknown words and what helped them to guess.

DATA ANALYSIS 1  Analysing the data according to the classification of Paribakht and Wesche (1999)  Calculating all the responses and finding their frequency

DATA ANALYSIS 2 Knowledge sources used in inferencing (Paribahkt and Wesche,1999:2) 1. Homonymy: sound relationships of phonetic similarity between the target word and another word in the learner’s mental lexicon. 2. Morphology: knowledge of derivations and grammatical inflections.

DATA ANALYSIS 3 3. Word associations: paradigmatic relations (synonyms or antonyms), syntagmatic relations (words in the same category), members of the same taxonomy (superordinates, subordinates, coordinates). 4. Sentence-level grammatical knowledge: word- class information and syntactic category of the word. 5. Discourse knowledge: knowledge of cohesive devices and establishing semantic links.

6. Cognates: “words in one language which is similar in form and meaning to a word in another language” (Richards et.al, 1985:43). 7. World knowledge: familiarity of theme and topic of the text. 8. Punctuation: knowledge of punctuation and capitalization.

RESULTS 1  In terms of homonymy category, low- intermediate level students tried to use more sound relations in L2 and all their guesses were incorrect (premise-promise, fruit-furious).  In terms of word association category, intermediate level students tried to establish associations of the words by using synonyms and antonyms more than low-intermediate level students.

RESULTS 2  The students in both levels employed discourse knowledge category more than the other categories. However, intermediate level students were more successful in using their knowledge of discourse.  Low-intermediate level students seemed to find the cognates of unknown words in their own language more than intermediate level students (e.g. grease, menthol, barrier).

CONCLUSIONS 1  Students in intermediate level seem to be more successful than the students in low- intermediate level in their guesses of the meaning of unknown words. This can be due to the level of students and the degree of risk- taking. Beebe (1983) states that guessing is part of risk-taking and effective readers test out hypotheses when the outcome is uncertain. Intermediate level students might be said to be high risk-takers.

CONCLUSIONS 2  Low-intermediate level students tried to associate the unknown words with the words they already know and some of their guesses were wrong. Foreign language learners who are quite early in their foreign language studies acquire vocabulary using mnemonic techniques, or strategies which involve cognates and phoneme correspondences (Lawson & Hogben, 1996).

IMPLICATIONS  Students can be exposed to explicit strategy training in terms of guessing.  Students may be exposed to different types of authentic reading materials and they may be encouraged to guess the meanings of unknown words in these texts.  Students can be trained to make word derivations and word associations.  Students, especially low level learners, can be encouraged to read without dictionary.

DATABASES - 1  EAT - The Edinburgh Associative Thesaurus (EAT) is a set of word association norms showing the counts of word association as collected from subjects.

DATABASES - 2  WordNet® is an online lexical reference system whose design is inspired by current psycholinguistic theories of human lexical memory. English nouns, verbs, adjectives and adverbs are organised into synonym sets, each representing one underlying lexical concept. Different relations link the synonym sets.