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چکیده
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While reading the written texts, the reader is definitely exposed to new words whose meanings appear crucial in order for the reader to comprehend the text. Coming across unknown words while reading a text is one of the problems which hinders the readers’ comprehension. Review of the related literature reveals that using dictionaries for checking the meaning of unknown words is not recommended; because it is time consuming and it makes the reading activity dull and boring. Several studies have tried to demonstrate the importance of vocabulary knowledge and offer some practical and useful strategies to help readers compensate their lack of appropriate level of vocabulary knowledge. To overcome this problem the teachers need to provide their learners with some compensatory strategies like strategy training. Once the effectiveness of (LI) and (MI) as two vocabulary learning strategies are confirmed for the vocabulary development of Iranian high school EFL learners, they can be of great help for vocabulary teaching and learning and enhancing reading comprehension skill. The present study, on the one hand, investigated whether or not strategies like Lexical Inferencing (LI) and Morphological Instruction (MI) can significantly affect EFL learners’ reading comprehension, and on the other hand, examined their effects on the learners’ vocabulary retention over time. For this aim, 60 homogeneous EFL learners were chosen and randomly assigned into two experimental and one control group, each one consisting of 20 subjects. After the pre-test, participants of the first experimental group received lexical inferencing strategy training for six 45- minute sessions. The second experimental group was provided with morphological instruction for six 45-minute sessions and as for the control group, the participants followed their regular reading comprehension courses without any strategy training. After the treatment phase, two post- tests with a short time interval were administered to
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