THE POWER OF WORDS IN READING COMPREHENSION

Author: Lamyae Lazaar & Professor Hind Brigui

ABSTRACT

The current research aims at identifying how High school learners inferred the meaning of unknown words. For that purpose, a quasi-experimental design which relied on a pretest, treatment, and a post-test.  The participants completed a 20-item related to reading comprehension test in which they were asked to complete a vocabulary task and provide the most suitable choice for an unknown term without utilizing dictionaries. The Chi-2 tests show that the L2 learners’ context and lexical knowledges were the most critical factors in understanding language and the treatment affected the experimental group’s results positively.

Keywords: Reading skills, Mental lexicon, Inferencing skills, Context, Cognitive schemas, Contextual cues, EFL classroom.

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BIOGRAPHICAL STATEMENTS

LAMYAE LAZAAR is an instructor of English as a foreign language in Morocco. She has been teaching for several years after receiving her bachelor of arts in pedagogy and language, and master’s degree in applied linguistics. She is currently a Ph.D. candidate and a member of the Research Laboratory ‘Literature, Arts and Pedagogical Engineering’ at Ibn Tofail University, Faculty of Arts and Languages.

Dr. HIND BRIGUI is currently an associate professor at the Faculty of Languages, Letters and Arts, Ibn Tofail University, Kenitra, Morocco where she has been teaching since 2009. She holds a Master’s Degree in Applied Linguistics and TEFL, and a Doctorate degree in Education both from the Faculty of Education, Mohamed V University, Rabat. Dr. Brigui is a member of the Research Laboratory ‘Literature, Arts and Pedagogical Engineering’, and a member of ‘Aryam the Jordanian Center for Research and Studies. She has published many empirical studies as articles and book chapters on different Applied Linguistics topics and has participated in a number of international conferences both in Morocco and abroad.