THE EFFECT OF TWO DIFFERENT PRE-READING ACTIVITIES ON GUESSING THE MEANING OF UNKNOWN WORDS BY IRANIAN EFL LEARNERS

This study aimed at investigating the extent to which Iranian pre-university students undertaking two different activities, predicting from topic and outlining, guess the meaning of unfamiliar words from the reading context. Also, it was an attempt to compare the effect of these two pre-reading activities on the students’ ability in guessing unfamiliar words. Among the 70 Iranian pre-university students who volunteered for this study, 49 were selected based on their performance on the Oxford Solution Proficiency Test. They were assigned randomly into two experimental groups: Outline Group and Predict Group. Each group received 8-sessions of treatment. Each session, they were required to read a text from the studentsʹ textbook including some unknown lexical items which were bolded and numbered in order to be guessed by the participants. The results highlighted the low rate of guessing accuracy by the students in both groups. Furthermore, the findings revealed that there is not statistically significant difference between the two experimental groups in terms of ability in guessing unfamiliar words from the reading context.