DefinePK

Abstract

The Simple View of Reading (SVR) suggests decoding and linguistic comprehension as the two components involved in reading comprehension. Linguistic comprehension is vital in this process since it supports the comprehension of the written text. Decoding is also fundamental to enable the reader to read the written text; decoding is supposed to become habitual and automatic over a couple of years of schooling for most children. Once the reader can decode effortlessly, other strategies are required to accelerate comprehension; among these, inference skills seem to be very important. Given the importance of reading and inference skills, the current study sought to investigate the relationship between inference skills (lexical and global inferencing) and reading comprehension among English language learners (ELL) in Iran. Additionally, the study aimed at finding the effect of teaching inference skills on reading comprehension performance. One hundred and twenty female high school students from Tehran were selected based on their scores on the Oxford Reading Test, indicating that they were at intermediate levels of English proficiency. The participants were randomly divided into a control and experimental group (each consisting of 60 students). The participants in the control group received conventional instructions of the school, while the participants in the experimental group were also taught inference skills. The participants in both groups were pre- and post-tested on their reading comprehension ability. Additionally, a multiplechoice test of reading comprehension measuring the global and lexical inferencing abilities was given to the participants. The results of the Spearman correlation coefficient indicated that there was a significant relationship between lexical inferencing and reading comprehension as well as global inferencing and reading comprehension. Additionally, the results of the independent samples t-test revealed that teaching inference skills had a significant effect on reading comprehension performance among ELLs. The findings of the study have implications for ESL/EFL contexts concerning teaching reading comprehension in general and inference skills in particular.