XXX
学院
语言学院
专业
英语
指导教师
XXX
职称
教授
姓名
XXX
年级
2006级
学号
XXXXXXX
n
1.1Study Background
The present study is stimulated by both practical andtheoreticalconsiderations in the field of second /foreign language learning and teaching. The importance of EFL reading is commonly acknowledged by both teachers and learners in the process of learning and teaching, so the topic of lexical inference strategies is of practical interest to both teachers, who would like to employ pedagogical techniques which can reinforce and develop students’achievementsin EFL reading to better their effects of instruction, and learners themselves, who once master those strategies, are in a better position to infer unknown word meanings in the process of reading. Learners can sometimesdeliberatelyapply those strategies to solve problems theyencounterin reading in order to conquer theinherentlydifficult task of learning a foreign language. This indicates that lexical inference ability and inferring strategies are paramount in EFL reading. As to the relationships among gender, majors, foreign language proficiency, lexical inference ability and inferring strategies respectively, they are also of practical interest to both language teachers, who can utilize different methods to instruct students ofdifferentgender and majors according to their different foreign language proficiency so as to facilitate both their teaching effects and students’understanding and researchers, who can investigate what factors ascribe to the differentiations and why, so as to make full use of advantages and avoid disadvantages to orient language teaching and learning inthe long run. To understand lexical inference and strategies, we have to referto thedefinitionsof inference, lexical inference, LIA and LS first.
1.2Definitions of Inference and Lexical Inference
Inference refers to the process, in language learning, of arriving at a hypothesis, idea, or judgment on the basis of other knowledge, ideas, or judgments, that is, the process of making inference or inferring (Richards&Platt and Platt, 2000:222). In language learning, inference has been discussed as a learning strategy used by learners,especiallyin reading, to work out grammatical and other kinds of rules (Carton, 1971). Accordingto W. Grabe and F.L.Stoller (2005:260),inferencerefers to the process of drawing alogical conclusionbased on explicit information intextand background knowledge. The mental activity/process involved when readers encounter unknown or unfamiliar words or phrases (hereafter for the sake of convenience we useunknownor unfamiliar words to refer to both unknownandunfamiliar words and phrases) and thereby assign meanings to them in the process of reading is termed“lexical inference or inferring (Barnett, 1990:79). Thus in this study we adopt the term lexical inference in the sense that readers are aware of encountering unknown or unfamiliar words or phrases, in the reading process, and make deliberate attempts to figure out their meanings and draw a logical conclusion based on the logical reasoning of the explicit information in a text and background knowledge. It is a deliberate andconsciousprocess of deriving meanings from co-text in reading process.
英语专业本科生开题报告样本
四川农业大学本科生毕业论文（设计）开题报告
毕业论文（设计）题目
An Empirical Study into Lexical Inference and Strategy Use into EFL Reading
EFL阅读中的词义推测及策略运用实证研究
选题类型
XXX
课题来源
Previous researches on word meanings in context has concentrated more on other foreign or second language reading strategies than on lexical inference strategies. Some theorists focus on receptive acquisition of vocabulary and recommend that students learn lexical inference techniques in order to enlarge their vocabularies (Bramski, D&Williams, 1984; Crow, 1986). For researchers investigating the categorizations of lexical inference strategies, results tend to be in two directions (1) towards a categorization of contextual clues students use or might use (Bramski, D&Williams 1984; Siebert, 1945, quoted from Barnett, 1990), and (2) towards an explanation of precisely how students discover meanings ofunfamiliarwords, that is the process of lexical inferring in test-taking. Studies on developing andinvestigating learners’learningand readingstrategies conducted by both language teachers and researchers are abundant in the last two decades (Oxford, 1990; O’Malley&Chamot, 1990;程晓堂,郑敏,2002;文秋芳,1996;肖建壮,1997), but only few of which focus their attention on lexical inference in reading.Availablestudies are those which view this issue from the perspective of reading strategies and concentrate on the process of lexical inferring (Bensoussan, M,&Laufer, 1984; Haynes,1984), aiming to explore how learners react when they encounter unknown or unfamiliar words in reading process. Researches into the categorization of lexical inference strategies are plentiful andabundantin the recent years (Adams,1982; Clarke and Nation,1980;王瑛,2006). Someattemptto validate the effectiveness of lexical inference strategy training attertiarylevel (王萍,2004), hoping to justify the effectiveness of lexical inference strategies training; some home in on the factors affecting lexical inference and their constraints (Palmberg,1987;任绍曾, 2003;赵福利,2002 ). A few studies concerned with relational investigation, for instance, study into the impact of language proficiency on lexical inference ability (刘津开,1999), study into influence of depth of vocabulary knowledge on lexicalinferentialsuccess(寻阳,孙丽,2006).