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The author thanks the five SSLA anonymous reviewers for their comments, the editor of SSLA, and the participants of the study.
Second language (L2) vocabulary development through reading involves associating new forms with their functions or referents. This begins when learners encounter unfamiliar words during reading and consider them relevant enough to warrant further processing. This process is known as lexical bootstrapping (e.g., Clark, 1993; De Bot, Paribakht, & Wesche, 1997; Nassaji, 2003; Sternberg, 1987). Lexical bootstrapping occurs against the backdrop of other reading processes, such as letter identification, lexical access, syntactic analysis, propositional encoding, sentence comprehension, intersentence integration, activation of prior knowledge, and comprehension monitoring (e.g., Bernhardt, 1991; Grabe & Stoller, 2002; Koda, 2005). During reading, the syntactic, semantic, and pragmatic knowledge that becomes activated through these processes is held in working memory and is used online to constrain subsequent textual and lexical interpretations. Not all learners are equally successful in lexical bootstrapping during reading because of differential reliance on various linguistic and extralinguistic skills and knowledge (e.g., Haynes, 1993; Haynes & Baker, 1993; Pulido, Hambrick, & Russell, 2007). Because there is individual variation in such skills and knowledge, there is widespread use of textual aids to facilitate comprehension (e.g., Nation, 2001). Textual aids, such as glosses, hypertext, and dictionaries, may also facilitate the creation of form-meaning connections, especially if learners are assigned strategic tasks that require their use, such as confirming and correcting guesses.
TEXTUAL AIDS AND VOCABULARY DEVELOPMENT
Studies have demonstrated the benefits of textual aids illustrating translations and word meanings on vocabulary retention (e.g., Fraser, 1999; Hulstijn, 1989, 1992; Hulstijn, Hollander, & Greidanus, 1996; Knight, 1994; Rott, 2005; Watanabe, 1997) as well as the superiority of such aids over methods that only rely on inferring (see, e.g., Mondria, 2003). This is because inferencing methods are subject to error due to individual variation in completing the requisite text processing operations. Individual variation can result from a number of factors, such as variability in sight vocabulary (i.e., the words whose meanings the reader can accurately recognize while reading), background knowledge, and reading and metacognitive skills. When learners experience difficulty constructing a context, they are also more apt to encounter difficulty in assigning meanings to new words...