Contextual Inferencing Strategies and Changes in Reading Attitudes the Case of Iranian EFL Undergraduates

Reading is the most demanding skill in learning English. According to F. May (2001), in order to have a full comprehension in reading, the learner requires «a variety of highly flexible process called comprehension strategies» (p. 119). In many societies, it is important that a person be able to read well so that s/he can be successful in life, but this does not mean that reading leads to success, but it is necessary to be a skillful reader in order to become successful (Grabe, 2009). R. Oxford (1990) claimed that inferencing strategies include using some linguistic or nonlinguistic clues to guess the meaning of the unknown words. However, some researchers stated that context does not always provide enough information and it is possible that learners may make wrong inferences and the strategy of inferencing works well with learners who have the skill of problem solving (Bensoussan & Laufer, 1984; Hulstijn, 1992: 114). Many studies have been done in order to investigate the e ect of the contextual inferencing strategies on reading comprehension and some studies have been done to investigate the di erent aspects of vocabulary and reading.

Over the past few decades, there were much emphasis on learners' attitudes, motivation, beliefs, in second language acquisition (Gardner & MacIntyre, 1993; Wenden, 1998). Masgoret, Bernaus, and Gardner (2001) stated that attitude can influence learners' motivation to learn another language. According to T. Merisuo-Storm (2007) and R. Oxford (1990), negative attitudes can retard the process of learning a new language; however, positive attitudes and feelings makes language learning more enjoyable and even more e ective. It is also defined by Smith (as cited in Yamashita, 2004: 33) as «a state of mind, accompanied by feelings and emotions that makes reading more or less probable». According to U. Schiefele, E. Scha ner, J. Moller, and A. Wigfield (2012), reading attitude depends on the experienced feelings and emotions towards reading task which can be either negative or positive. Learners attitudes towards reading has an e ect on both their motivation and reading success since it a ects the amount of time a learner spends on reading activity (Lazarus & Callahan, 2000). Moreover, T. Kaniuka (2010) tried to find the relationship between reading strategies and learners' attitudes towards reading. He concluded that those learners who received reading instruction, got higher scores in their attitudes towards reading, and as a result, he concluded that it is better to help EFL learners to have positive attitudes towards reading by using e ective instructions in reading.

Most teachers agree that it is important to be knowledgeable in vocabulary and they believe that learning a second language demands learning vocabularies. A great number of ideas have been raised in order to prove how important vocabulary knowledge is in language acquisition. N. Schmitt (2004) claimed that there is a high relationship between learning vocabulary and proficiency in di erent aspects of language. According to some studies performed by L. Verhoeven and C. Perfetti (2008), reading comprehension has a strong relationship with decoding of words and language skills like vocabulary knowledge. They also claimed that vocabulary knowledge is the most significant factor in reading comprehension. According to Schmitt (2004), one of the most important factors in ascertaining the di culty of an English text is the number of unknown vocabularies.

Research Questions

Does explicit instruction through contextual inferencing a ect Iranian EFL undergraduates' attitudes towards English reading?

Is there any relationship between Iranian EFL undergraduates' encounters with unknown vocabularies in English texts and their attitudes towards reading in English?

What are the Iranian EFL undergraduates' viewpoints regarding the e ectiveness of contextual inferencing strategies in EFL classrooms?

Previous Studies

Reading is the most demanding skill in learning English. As P. Ur (1996) stated, reading is not only about decoding written symbols, but it means `reading and understanding'. According to F. May (2001), in order to have a full comprehension in reading, the learner requires «a variety of highly flexible process called comprehension strategies» (p. 119). In many societies, it is important that a person be able to read well so that s/he can be successful in life, but this does not mean that reading leads to success, but it is necessary to be a skillful reader in order to become successful (Grabe, 2009). De Vignemont and T. Singer (2006) believe that readers have to adopt the writers' viewpoints in order to get the information of the text and comprehend it logically, and also to understand the characters' motions and feelings.

According to J. Coady (1997), a learner with a low knowledge of vocabulary will be discouraged to read English texts, and when reading tasks decreases, the vocabulary growth will decrease as well. In addition, T. Paribakht and M. Wesche (1999) stated «the higher the academic level, the greater the vocabulary mastery needed» (p. 196). According to N. Schmitt (2004), one of the most important factors in ascertaining the di culty of an English text is the number of unknown vocabularies. The di culty of a text depends on the number of new vocabularies the text includes (Kilian et al., 1995).

S. Carton (1971) introduced contextual inferencing strategies as using the written text and the context in order to guess the meaning of new vocabularies. J. Walters (2004) stated that learners can use other ways to get the meanings of new vocabularies besides using dictionary. They can guess the meaning from the context and the cues exists in the context or they can ignore the new word they encountered; however, ignoring the word limits the learning potential and is not considered as a good way to cope with new words (Fraser, 1999). According to Nassaji (2006), those learners who have a high vocabulary knowledge are more successful in inferencing strategies than those with lower knowledge as they can have more accessibility to their background knowledge, and they are able to build an accurate semantic representation when they encounter an unfamiliar vocabulary.

J. Walters (2006a-b) performed a research with participation of 44 ESL students at San Diego State University with di erent nationalities and proficiency levels. The design of the research was pre- and post-test with the aim of investigating the e ectiveness of teaching three approaches of using the context to guess the word meanings. The three methods of teaching were one general strategy in order to get the meaning of the unknown words, teaching learners how to recognize and understand the context clues to use, and finally practicing with cloze exercises. The participants of the study received six hours of training and then the researcher gave them the post-test. After analyzing the data, the researcher noticed that the participants in experimental group performed better on the post-test and got higher scores in comparison to the control group. The results of the study indicated that training these methods had a positive e ect on learners' reading comprehension.

Another study done by X. Fuping (2006) to investigate the e ect of strategy training on learners' reading comprehension. Seventy-six intermediate EFL students participated in the study and were assigned to two groups of experimental and control. The researcher used a learning strategy questionnaire before and after the treatment. A reading test was used as the pre-test, and at the end of the treatment, another reading test were conducted by the researcher as the post-test. The results of the study revealed a significant improvement in the participants' post-test which could be concluded that the lexical strategies had a positive e ect on learners' reading comprehension

Methodology. Participants and Setting

Sixty Iranian BA undergraduates majoring in Teaching English as a Foreign Language (TEFL) and Translation Studies at the English Department of Shiraz Azad University were selected through stratified sampling technique. They were homogenized based on Oxford Placement Test. The selected students were randomly assigned to two groups of experimental and control. Both male and female students (12 males, 48 females) within the age range of 19-23 (mean of age: 21) were selected to participate in this study.

Instruments

To collect the necessary data for this study two instruments were utilized. First, an `Attitudes towards Reading in English' questionnaire was administered to the participants. This questionnaire was developed by Figen Tezdiker (2007) and modified by the researcher. It was composed of four parts: a) personal information about the learners (i.e. name, gender, field of studies, and level), b) 31 items for attitudes of the learners towards reading and for joy of reading, scored on five-point-likert scale (i.e. strongly agree=1, agree=2, undecided=3, disagree=4, strongly disagree=5), c) one general question about their attitudes towards reading in a foreign language, and d) seven items for attitudes of learners towards unknown vocabulary encounters which were added to the questionnaire by the researcher from `Attitude towards Reading in English' questionnaire by Demet Kulac (2016). The questionnaire was scored on five-point-likert scale to analyze the attitudes of the learners towards reading English texts. F. Tezdiker (2007) has also validated the original version of the questionnaire. Since the questionnaire was modified by the researcher, the validity was confirmed through pilot study during this research. To do so, thirthy EFL students were selected randomly from the target population, and homogenized through Oxford Placement test. Twenty learners were selected after the Oxford Placement test, and were assigned to two groups of control and experimental randomly. To ensure that the questionnaire used in this study enjoyed reliability, the researcher used the Cronbach Alpha reliability and it was reported as 0.78. In Order to elicit participants' viewpoints regarding the e ectiveness of contextual inferencing strategies, a revised version of Demet Kulac's interview (2016) was used. There were five main questions for the students to respond to, and the responses were recorded by the researcher while interviewing, and analyzed according to the analysis of the interview used in Demet Kulac's article (2016).

Data Analysis Procedure

In order to test the e ect of explicit instructions in contextual inferencing strategies and unknown vocabulary encounters on Iranian undergraduates' attitudes towards reading, the data gathered through the questionnaire were analyzed by using the Statistical Package for Social Sciences (SPSS) to see whether strategy training had a significant e ect on learners' attitudes towards reading in English. In order to figure out the e ect of unknown vocabulary encounters, the correlation between the learner's attitudes towards unknown vocabulary encounters and towards reading attitudes in English was calculated using Pearson Correlation Coe cient. As for the interview, qualitative techniques such as eyeballing, coding, sorting, and pattern building were applied to the recorded and transcribed data of the interview according to the qualitative analysis of the interview used in Demet Kulac's research in (2011), and discussed at the end of the study.

Results and Discussion

RQ. 1. Results of the First Research Question

Paired samples statistics was obtained for learners' pre- and post-test of control and experimental groups and their attitudes in order to find out if explicit instruction through contextual inferencing strategies have any e ect on Iranian EFL learners' attitudes towards reading English texts as shown in table 1. Thereafter, the paired sample t-test was implemented to analyze and compare the mean scores between learners' pre-test and post tests, as depicted in table 1.

Table 1. The mean scores between learners' pre-test and post-tests

Paired Samples Statistics of Learners' Pre-tests and Post-tests of Reading Attitudes

As illustrated in table 1, the mean score in pre- and post-tests of control group were M=2.68 and M=2.60 respectively, and the mean scores in pre- and post-test of experimental group were M=2.68 and M=2.38 respectively. Since in the scale of the questionnaire, the strongly agree option considered as 1, and the strongly disagree option got the score 5 (i.e. strongly agree=1, agree=2, undecided=3, disagree=4, strongly disagree=5), the mean score measured in the post-test was lower than the mean score in pre-test; therefore, the lower mean score in the post test showed that the treatment changed learners' attitudes positively. Then, to assess the significance of the di erence between groups, the researcher run paired samples t-test. The results are presented in table 2.

Table 2. Significance of the di erence between groups

Paired Samples T-Test of Learners' Pre-Tests and Post-Tests of Reading Attitudes

Based on the Table 2, there was not any significant di erence between learners' pre- and post-tests of control group (t (29) = 0.938, p>0.05), while there was a statistically significant di erence in mean scores between learners' pre-test and post-test of experimental group (t (29) = 7.35, p< 0.05), suggesting that learners' attitudes towards English reading could change when they are taught through strategy instructions.

Furthermore, in order to know how big the di erence between the means of pre- and post-tests of experimental group was, the researcher calculated the e ect size or the strength of association which showed the relative magnitude of the di erence. The following formula was utilized to calculate the means di erence. This formula was used in order to check the e ect size of the mean di erences.

squared= ( ^л2) / ( ^л2+ )

squared= (7.357Л2) / (7.357Л2+29)

Then, by putting the values in the formula, the obtained e ect size was (0.65), which means that 65 percent of the variances were e ective in this study.

RQ. 2. Results of the Second Research Question

The second research question delved into unknown vocabulary to indicate that if there is any relationship between learners' encounters with unknown vocabularies in English and their attitudes toward reading in English. Therefore, the researcher calculated the correlation between the learners' attitudes towards unknown vocabularies in reading texts and towards reading in English. Tables 3 depicted the results, and descriptions related to the results are presented in following.

Table 3. Pearson Correlation Coe cient between the Learners' Attitudes towards Unknown Vocabularies in Reading Texts and Towards Reading in English

As demonstrated in Table 3, there was a negative relationship between the learners' attitudes towards unknown vocabularies in reading texts and towards reading in English. In fact, the correlation coe cient was -.59 and the significant value was less than 0.01. Therefore, it can be concluded that there was a negative relationship between the learners' attitudes towards unknown vocabularies in reading texts and towards reading in English. According to the results obtained, the more learners encounter unknown vocabularies, the lower their attitudes towards reading would be.

RQ. 3. Results of the Third Research Question

In order to know the learners' viewpoints about the e ectiveness of contextual inferencing, 20 learners were chosen randomly from the experimental group for the semi-structured interview after the treatment. The interview included five main questions for each learner to answer to. The questions were about the learners' ideas and feelings about explicit instruction of contextual inferencing strategies, the usefulness of the inferencing strategies and if they use them in the future, whether the strategy training is able to change the participants' reading attitudes, if the strategy training motivates them to read more in English, and to find out how they felt about the unknown vocabularies in English texts after strategy training. The majority of the participants reported positive feelings about the strategy training. Moreover, they believed that the contextual inferencing strategies are e ective in reading, and they planned to use these strategies in the future when they want to read a text so that they can infer the meaning of new words in the context. Some of the learners thought that they may have a wrong understanding of the text and the vocabularies, but most of them mentioned the usefulness of reading strategies. The learners mentioned that the contextual inferencing strategies made them more confident and gave them a good feeling about themselves when they are able to comprehend the text they are reading. Most of them were motivated to read English texts after learning the reading strategies because they believed using these strategies are fun and enjoyable when they understand the texts, and finally, contextual inferencing strategies has helped the majority of the participants in reading comprehension and changed their attitudes towards unknown vocabulary encounters in a positive way, and they were also able to overcome their stress when they encountered new vocabularies in English texts in comparison to the past. Moreover, five major factors were drawn from in participants' responses to the interview questions such as positive attitudes towards reading, the joy of reading, vocabularies in reading, autonomy, and motivation. These factors concluded from learners' responses are presented along with the participants' percentage in table 4.

Table 4. Percentages of the Factors in Qualitative Data

According to the above table, figure 1 shows the percentages of the factors seen in the participants' points of view.

Conclusion