Investigating EFL teachers’ vocabulary teaching practices through reading comprehension

The present study elaborates on how EFL teachers deal with unknown/unfamiliar words in reading comprehension. It involves sixty-nine (69) EFL teachers selected through the snowballing sampling technique. As a result, the study endeavours to answer the research question ‘How familiar are EFL teachers with contextual clues used in reading comprehension for word meaning inferencing?’ A questionnaire is used to collect the data. Qualitative and quantitative data were collected to enable qualitative, quantitative and mixed-methods analysis. Statistical Package in Social Services (SPSS), version 17.0 (2008) was deployed to process the data. The results have indicated that the majority of the teachers do not resort to contextual clues to teach vocabulary through reading. The results also showed that the majority of EFL teachers are not familiar with contextual clues used to infer word meanings through reading, and that many of them have not received any training on contextual clues used for the teaching of vocabulary through reading comprehension. Keywords: EFL teachers, Vocabulary teaching/learning, Reading comprehension, Contextual clues, English as a foreign language (EFL).