Abstract
Objective. The present study examined the impact of contextual inferencing on Iranian EFL learners’ attitudes towards reading in English.
 Methods and techniques of the research. To achieve such goals, 60 BA undergraduate students at Islamic Azad University of Shiraz, majoring in English teaching and English translation studies within the age range of 19-23 participated in the study. They were divided into two groups of control and experimental randomly. The data were collected through an ‘Attitude towards Reading’ questionnaire and a revised version of Demet Kulac’s (2011) interview in two phases before and after the instruction.
 Results. The comparison of pre- and post-questionnaires showed that contextual inferencing strategies had a positive effect on learners’ attitudes towards reading, and there was a negative relationship between unknown vocabulary encounters and learners’ attitudes towards reading English texts. Finally, the analysis of the interview confirmed the effectiveness of strategy training in reading attitudes and showed some other factors which were enhanced by using contextual inferencing strategies.
 Conclusions. The findings contribute to syllabus designers and teachers in reading comprehension and international tests preparation courses.
Highlights
Reading is the most demanding skill in learning English
This study intended to investigate the effect of contextual inferencing on Iranian EFL undergraduates’ attitudes towards reading skill, the relationship between unknown vocabulary encounters and learners’ attitudes towards reading tasks, and learners’ viewpoints regarding the effectiveness of using contextual inferencing strategies in their reading task
According to the findings of the study, the participants in experimental group performed better in reading tasks and reading attitude questionnaire as their mean scores in the post-questionnaire were significantly different from their mean scores in pre-questionnaire
Summary
Reading is the most demanding skill in learning English. May (2001), in order to have a full comprehension in reading, the learner requires «a variety of highly flexible process called comprehension strategies» It is important that a person be able to read well so that s/he can be successful in life, but this does not mean that reading leads to success, but it is necessary to be a skillful reader in order to become successful (Grabe, 2009). R. Oxford (1990) claimed that inferencing strategies include using some linguistic or nonlinguistic clues to guess the meaning of the unknown words. Many studies have been done in order to investigate the effect of the contextual inferencing strategies on reading comprehension and some studies have been done to investigate the different aspects of vocabulary and reading
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