This quasi-experimental study attempted to examine the impact of using contextual clues to infer EFL unknown/unfamiliar word meanings in reading comprehension. In fact, the study was concerned with the following seven (7) contextual clues: synonymous clues, antonymous clues, morphological/derivational clues, definitional clues, example clues, L2/French-related clues, thematic/collocational clues.
A pre-test, a post-test, and a classroom observation protocol were used as data collection instruments. The teaching materials were reading texts, and two types of vocabulary lesson plans combined with formative vocabulary tests. The study involved a sample of 110 1ère A students (lower-sixth formers/SHS2 students of Arts option) out of 119 from Boussé in ‘la Région du Plateau Central’, Burkina Faso. These students had spent at least 6 years in the learning of English as a foreign language. This sample was chosen using single-stage random sampling technique by considering the alphabetical list of the students. Then, it was divided into experimental (55) and control (55) groups. Qualitative method, quantitative method, and mixed-methods approach were used to analyse the data. The Statistical Package for Social Services (SPSS), version 17.0 (2008) was deployed to process the quantitative data. The results showed that EFL learners in my study area reacted positively about using contextual clues to derive the meanings of unknown/unfamiliar words in reading comprehension. The results also revealed positive impact of the exploitation of contextual clues on word meaning inferencing in reading comprehension.

Contextual clues, Vocabulary teaching/learning, Word meaning, Reading comprehension, EFL