The Effect Of Contextual Guessing Strategy On Enhancing Efl Students' Vocabulary Knowledge

Résumé: Reading is proved to be the primary source for vocabulary learning. However, students in our department are seemed to skip new words or over- rely on the dictionary when encountering them in a reading text. And teachers did not work to raise their awareness to use the appropriate strategies. The present study aimed at exploring the effect of contextual guessing strategy on enhancing EFL students' vocabulary knowledge. Therefore, we hypothesized that if learners use contextual guessing strategy, their vocabulary knowledge would be enhanced. In order to confirm or reject the hypothesis, a quasi- experimental design was carried out. The participants enrolled in the experiment were 33 second-year LMD students of english at Larbi Ben M'Hidi university ofOum-El-Bouaghi during the second term of 2014-2015academic-years. They were divided into two groups: one is an experimental, and the other one is a control; both groups were pre-tested using an MCQ with decontextualized items followed by sentence writing. Then the experimental group received instructions onthe use of contextual guessing strategy to know words meaning from the reading texts, and answer comprehension questions. Whereas, the control group did not receive any instructions and left with the traditional method (answering comprehension questions and no attention was given to the words in the texts). After that, the posttest was given for both groups the same as the pre-test. Interestingly, the results gained by the end of the experiment indicated that there was an improvement in the experimental group posttest performance.

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