The Comparative Impacts of Using Lexical Glossing and Inferencing Strategies on Students’ Reading Comprehension

Abstract

The study compared the use of the lexical glossing and inferencing strategies that impact toward the students’ reading comprehension. The objective of the study was to find out the effective strategy to use for enhancing the students’ reading comprehension. The population of the study was 40 Informatics Systems students of Potensi Utama University. The data collection was used written test by comparing the scores results after giving the treatment. The written test was conducted to identify students’ reading comprehension performance toward the use of lexical glossing and inferencing strategies. The data was analyzed applying an experimental research design. There were two tests in this study before and after treatment. Before treatment without using the strategies, the first test was applied to first group and second group. After treatment with using the strategies, the second test was applied to the first and second group. The first group was taught using lexical glossing strategy, while the second group was treated using lexical inferencing strategies. The test resulted that the students in the second group using lexical inferencing strategies could guess the unfamiliar word meaning correctly that impact toward the students’ reading comprehension. While the students in the first group using the lexical glossing strategy make erroneous guesses about unfamiliar word meaning that impact on the students’ reading comprehension. Therefore, it can be concluded that lexical inferencing strategy was recommended to teach to enhance the students’ reading comprehension.