INFERENCING FAKE WORDS’ MEANING BY MOROCCAN EFL LEARNERS
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.34301/alsc.v3i1.25Keywords:
mental lexicon, lexical inferencing, frame, context, stored meaningAbstract
Do Moroccan EFL learners depend on the context to infer the meaning of unknown words occurring in sentences? This study investigates the way intermediate and advanced learners infer the meaning of fake words. To this end, the subjects took a test consisting of 60 items with three multiple choices. Subjects were asked to provide appropriate, inappropriate meanings of the unknown word or none of the choices without using dictionaries. The Chi-2 tests were adopted to determine whether there is a) a statistically significant difference between the three categories and b) a statistically significant difference between intermediate and advanced learners’ inferencing results. The findings demonstrate that the context along with the lexical knowledge of the L2 learners play the most important role in understanding vocabulary.
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