Effects of Reading Strategies and Depth of Vocabulary Knowledge on Turkish EFL Learners’ Text Inferencing Skills

Within the framework of foreign language teaching and learning, reading strategies, depth of vocabulary knowledge and text inferencing skills have not been researched extensively. This study tries to fill this gap by analyzing the effects of reading strategies used by Turkish EFL learners and their depth of vocabulary knowledge on their text inferencing skills. Three different measures were used in the study- Word Association Test (WAT), Metacognitive Awareness of Reading Strategies Inventory (MARSI), and inferencing questions used in a standardized national test. The association test and reading strategies scores were regressed on inferencing scores of the participants. The results revealed that depth of vocabulary knowledge was a better predictor of inferencing skills compared to reading strategies. However, the model created by using these two predictors accounted for only 15% of the variance, and the major implication of this result is that there are other more significant factors which affect text inferencing skills of EFL learners than reading strategies and depth of vocabulary knowledge.