The present quasi-experimental study, adopting a pre-test, treatment, and post-test design, attempted to find out the effective strategies that help EFL learners figure out the meanings of unknown/unfamiliar words in reading. It concerned synonymous clues, antonymous clues, morphological/derivational clues, definitional clues, example clues, French related clues, thematic/collocational clues. The study endeavours to answer the following question: Which contextual clues are the most effective for EFL vocabulary learning in reading? A pre-test, a post-test, and a semi-structured interview were used to collect the data. The materials were reading texts, and two types of vocabulary lesson plans. A sample of 110 secondary school students out of 118 students were involved in this study. The sample was composed of lower-sixth formers (SH2 students) students from Boussé, Burkina Faso. These students have spent at least six years in the learning of English as foreign language. The 110 students were divided into experimental (55) and control (55) groups. The sample is chosen using single-stage random sampling technique by considering the alphabetical list of the students. Qualitative method, quantitative method, and mixed-methods approach were used for the analysis of the data. The Statistical Package in Social Services (SPSS), version 17.0 (2008) was deployed to process the data. The results indicated that the top three effective contextual clues used for vocabulary learning are definitional clues, morphological/derivational clues, and thematic/collocational clues.

Contextual clues Vocabulary teaching/learning Word meaning Reading comprehension