Teaching Business English Vocabulary through Reading: A Discourse Analysis Perspective

Abstract

Inferring meanings of unknown words when reading texts is one of the most important vocabulary learning strategies students of BE need to master. Learners, however, seem to miss the skills that this strategy provides as they depend heavily on translation in understanding unfamiliar words when reading. This is a consequence of language teachers‘ emphasis on translation in explaining newly introduced vocabulary items in reading. The present inquiry investigates whether teaching explicitly the different strategies of inferring word meanings would lead the involved participants to gain the skill of inferring the meaning of unknown words from their context of use. An experiment is carried out to investigate the effectiveness of the method of direct teaching of the different inferring strategies. One group of learners was taught following this method. A pre-test and a post-test were administered and the results of the two tests were analysed and compared. The results confirm that the proposed method of teaching the inferring strategies of word meanings helped the sample to improve