Growing concerns have been voiced about strategies employed in L2 reading in general and dealing with unknown words in particular. Among other strategies, lexical inferencing has received attention in the literature. However, more research is needed to further clarify how different levels of L2 reading proficiency may affect the readers'…

Language teachers often encourage L2 readers to guess the meaning of unknown words in texts. This paper argues that before any statements about the value of guessing can be made, it is necessary to show how reliable learners' guesses are. To this end, the present study investigates how accurately EFL learners assess their understanding of unknown…