Centre for Languages and Literature

The empirical study reported in this essay concerns Swedish university level learners of English as a foreign language (EFL) and their lexical inferencing skills, that is, their ability to guess the meaning of unknown words in a running text using different types of knowledge and textual cues (Haastrup, 1991). More precisely, the present investigation explores the relationship between students ’ inferencing behaviour and the quality of their vocabulary knowledge, which is commonly referred to as vocabulary depth (Qian, 2002). The study aims at examining whether learners demonstrating a deep vocabulary make use of different kinds of knowledge when inferring word meanings than learners with less lexical depth. Attention was also paid to how the word class of an unknown word influences the inferencing process. Twenty students participated in the study and were asked to perform two different tasks: a vocabulary depth test (WAT) and a lexical inferencing task. The latter amounted to verbally inferring the meaning of 12 supposedly unknown target words from a reading passage composed for this particular experiment. As a means to investigate the inferencing procedure in relation to the grammatical form (i.e. word class) of a target word