An Investigation of Relationships between Knowledge Sources and Success in L2 Lexical Inferencing by Chinese University Students

This research aims to investigate(1) the knowledge sources applied by foreign language students when they encounterunknown words in written text;(2) the correct rate of university-level Chinese students’ L2 lexical inferencing and(3) the relation-ship between the knowledge sources and success of lexical inferencing.Questionnaire,group thinking-aloud protocols and retro-spective report were combined in use to examine university-level students’ lexical inferencing procedures.In this study,twentysophomore students in university were given a 330-word reading passage with 10 test items and asked to verbalize their thoughtsabout their inferencing.General findings of this study are(1) a variety of knowledge sources were applied by informants during thisinferencing procedure,among which contextual cues were used more frequently than the other two categories of cues;(2) the correctrate of the L2 lexical inferencing is not high and(3) there is no specific relationship between knowledge sources and success of lexi-cal inferencing,as the results showed that different participants could achieve the same inferencing based on using different typesof knowledge sources.