A study on lexical inferencing : to what extent, and in what ways, do pupils make use of the lexical inferencing strategies, learnt in school when they encounter and unknown English word in their spare time?

Background: During our VFU (Workplace-based Education), we met a teacher, who worked with metacognitive strategies, and used a holistic, top-down approach with her pupils. The teacher had been working with them in this way for three years. We wanted to know how the pupils used lexical inferencing strategies they had learned about in school, in their spare time outside school. Purpose and aim: The purpose of the study was to examine the use of lexical inferencing strategies and the aim was to find out whether pupils who had been encouraged to use lexical inferencing strategies in classroom teaching actually used these strategies when encountering unknown English words in their spare time. Method: We used a qualitative, semi-structured group interview, with an interview guide approach as method to achieve descriptions of the lived world of our interviewees. Eighteen out of 24 pupils in a 9th grade class were interviewed. We conducted six interviews, since the pupils were interviewed in groups of three. During the process of data analysis four different categories of strategy use emerged. Results: The results of our study showed that the pupils used the following strategies when encountering an English word outside school: avoidance, referring to another resource, inferencing from context and metalinguistic knowledge. The results also showed that even though the pupils are trained to use these strategies in school, they did not use them consistently in free time encounters with English language text