The Relationship between Iranian EFL Learners’ Attitudes towards English Language Learning and Their Inferencing Ability in Reading Comprehension

In line with recent focus on learner characteristics in L2 learning, this study was conducted to explore the relationship between Iranian EFL learners' attitudes towards English language learning and their inferencing ability in reading comprehension. Investigating the performance of these learners on inference test according to their gender and different linguistic contexts were secondary goals of the study. After the homogenizing process, a group of learners of both sexes were put in the final group. The attitude questionnaire and the inference test were administered in order to examine the learners' attitudes and inferencing ability respectively. In order to investigate the role of linguistic context, the inference test was then divided into two sub-tests of short and long passages. The results of the analyses for the collected data indicated a moderate positive correlation between the attitudes of the learners and their inferencing performance. The effect of linguistic context on inferencing turned out to be significant too. However, no significant difference was found between the mean scores of the males and females on the inference test. Index Terms--attitude, inference, EFL learner, reading comprehension, linguistic context