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57 Apuntes de Investigación en la Enseñanza de Idiomas

Conclusions

After having conducted this study, the following conclusions emerged. First, making conscious infe-
rences was the strategy that the five participants applied. There were two variations of this strategy:
some of them inferred the meaning of unknown words by using internal and external clues, while the
others related information in the text to their prior knowledge. When participants used internal clues,
they appealed to the structure of the word and looked for cognates. On the other hand, when parti-
cipants searched for external clues, they activated their content Schema and inferred the meaning of
the unknown word by identifying the main idea of the paragraph where it was the word.

Second, despite the fact that all the participants made conscious inferences when dealing with unfa-
miliar vocabulary, three out of the five participants were not able to activate their Content Schemata
when attempting to deal with unfamiliar vocabulary. This could have been because they did not know
how to activate their previous knowledge about the topic of the text or perhaps they did not have any
previous knowledge of the topic of the text they read. Therefore, it is essential readers have previous
knowledge about the topic of the reading.

Finally, the conclusions allow the researcher to make some suggestions. First, more attention should
be paid to encourage students to develop their reading skills and train them in the use of reading
strategies for decrypting vocabulary. Secondly, a further study should focus its attention on strategies
students can apply to activate their schemata for dealing with unknown vocabulary. Additionally, a
further research should inquire how students apply metacognitive strategies to deal with unknown
words.

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