Does Glossing Affect Thai EFL Students’ Reading Comprehension and Lexis Acquisition?

Abstract

This study was a one-group pretest-posttest experiment and aimed to investigate the effect of glossing on reading
comprehension and lexis acquisition of 30 Bangkok University students and explores their attitude towards the use of glossing.
The instruments were the reading comprehension tests, and the questionnaire exploring attitude towards glossing. The pretest
and posttest scores of the experimental group were calculated by descriptive statistics and compared by using a dependent t-
Test measure. It was found that students obtained higher scores for the posttest than the pretest scores at the 0.05 level of
significance. In addition, their attitude towards using glossing was at a high level. Moreover, the results from this study supported
that using glossing helped the students remember vocabulary and can be a substitute for a dictionary consultation when
encountering low frequency words in a reading passage. Pedagogical implications into reading comprehension and lexis
acquisition were suggested.