Reading and Writing

, Volume 31, Issue 5, pp 1109–1132 | Cite as

The challenge and the opportunity of lexical inferencing in language minority students

Article
First Online:

Abstract

Lexical inferencing from text is a powerful tool for vocabulary and reading comprehension enhancement. Lexical inferencing relies on the pre-requisite skills of reading and existing vocabulary, and is also linked to non-verbal inferencing abilities and reading comprehension. In this study, we examined whether Fifth-grade Russian-speaking language minority (LM) students might exhibit reduced lexical inferencing abilities in comparison to their native Hebrew-speaking (NH) peers, due to their reduced proficiency in the societal language. Participants completed a measure of lexical inferencing during text reading, and measures of underlying skills, including vocabulary, word reading accuracy, reading comprehension and non-verbal inferencing. As a group, LM students demonstrated comparable lexical inferencing abilities to those of their NH peers despite significantly lower vocabulary knowledge in vocabulary. Two explanations are suggested; first, although LM students had reduced vocabulary, they were nonetheless above the vocabulary threshold required for text comprehension. Second, the regression analyses revealed that non-verbal inferencing explained unique variance only in the LM group, demonstrating that they recruited language-external resources to support lexical inferencing. The current results show that lexical inferencing can serve as a powerful tool for promoting reading comprehension and vocabulary, domains that are points of weakness for language minority students.

Keywords

Language minority Lexical inferencing Reading comprehension Vocabulary 
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Notes

Acknowledgements

The authors thank Shira Bleicher, Moran Hatan and Ina Kandelis for research assistance and Nashchon Korem for help in data analyses. The current study was partly supported by the Edmond J. Safra Brain Research Center for the Study of Learning Disabilities.

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© Springer Science+Business Media B.V., part of Springer Nature 2018

Authors and Affiliations

  1. 1.Department of Learning Disabilities and Edmond J. Safra Brain Research Center for the Study of Learning Disabilities, Faculty of EducationUniversity of HaifaHaifaIsrael

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