This quasi-experimental study assesses the use of contextual clues to infer EFL unknown/unfamiliar word meanings in reading comprehension. In fact, the study is concerned with synonymous clues, antonymous clues, morphological/derivational clues, definitional clues, example clues, L2/French-related clues and thematic/collocational clues. A pre-test, a post-test and a classroom observation protocol are used to collect the data. The teaching materials are reading texts and two types of vocabulary lesson plans combined with formative vocabulary tests. The study involves a sample of 110 1ère A students in Boussé in ‘la Région du Plateau Central’, Burkina Faso. This sample is chosen using single-stage random sampling technique by considering the alphabetical list of the students. Then, it is divided into experimental (55) and control (55) groups. Qualitative method, quantitative method and mixed-methods approach are used to analyse the data. The Statistical Package for Social Services (SPSS), version 17.0 (2008) is deployed to process the quantitative data. The results indicate that students can successfully learn EFL vocabulary through reading relying on contextual clues. The results also reveal positive impact of the exploitation of contextual clues on word meaning inferencing in reading comprehension.

Vocabulary teaching/learning, Word meaning, Reading comprehension, English as foreign language (EFL), Contextual clues