A word attack skills-based program to enhance EFL secondary school students' vocabulary learning, reading comprehension and self-efficacy

Abstract EN

Word attack skills/strategies refer to techniques that help students to deal with the unfamiliar word by using the available clues within it and in context.

These skills are valuable for both first language (L1) and second language (L2) readers as it is almost impossible to memorize all the vocabulary in the target language and as frequent use of a dictionary disrupts the natural flow of reading.

When English as a second/foreign language (ESL/EFL) learners encounter unfamiliar vocabulary during reading, they tend to employ a number of strategies: ignoring the word, consulting a dictionary, seeking teacher's assistance, using word parts (roots, prefixes or suffixes) or inferring the meaning of the word from context.

Students need to acquire the latter two strategies to deal with the unfamiliar words that impede comprehension.

Considering word attack skills in an EFL setting, it is assumed that inferring from context can compensate for EFL learners' limited vocabulary knowledge (Bialystok, 1998; Oxford, 2003) as a result of little exposure to L2 comprehensible input (Krashen, 1989) obtained from reading and listening.

Since English is merely used inside classroom settings, reading rather than speaking or writing seems to be of great value to these learners.

Therefore, teaching these skills/strategies can be useful in developing two areas: ability to infer the meanings of unknown words from context and using morphological clues, which in turn develops their skill of reading.

Current Egyptian EFL textbooks need to focus more on these skills, while also addressing other reading strategies such as identifying main ideas, reading between the lines (making inferences), skimming and scanning.

Examining Hello! English for Secondary Schools (Haines & Dallas, 2008), it appears that there is little evidence of treatment of these skills, especially in the context of reading comprehension.

This is because there are a few activities or follow-up practice opportunities that address guessing the meaning from context.

It has been observed by the researcher that a large number of secondary school students have several comprehension problems while reading written texts in an EFL setting, one of which is their deficiency to derive the meanings of unknown words from context.

This is mainly because they are accustomed to memorizing long vocabulary lists as the sole method of vocabulary learning, and because they lack experience and training in guessing the meaning from context and using affixation (prefixes or suffixes).

Furthermore, they rarely receive formal or direct instruction in these strategies from their teachers.

The outcome may be that they simply ignore a new word without making any effort to discover its meaning, or that they give up reading, and this in turn leads to limited vocabulary knowledge and poor reading ability.