A Study On The Effect Of Lexical Knowledge On Listening Comprehension In CET4

Vocabulary knowledge serves as a foundation for language competence as wellas a bridge for communication. Teachers and researchers have long realized that thelexical ability is central to communicative competence. There exists a high reliabilityof vocabulary knowledge in predicting the language competence of second languageor foreign language learners. However, the relationship between lexical ability andreading has been concentrated on in many of the past research and literatures. On thecontrary, little research has been carried out to dig the influence of vocabularyknowledge on listening comprehension. The present study attempts to research howthe vocabulary size and depth of Chinese English learners influence their listeningcomprehension in CET4.The present work aims to experimentally find out the influence of vocabularysize and depth on listening comprehension ability by analyzing data collected from agroup of90non-English major freshmen. Vocabulary Levels Test (receptive version)and Word Associates Test have been employed to measure the subjects’ vocabularyknowledge. Scores on CET4-LCT have been obtained with the help of NationalCollege English Testing Committee. Two-tailed Pearson product-movementcorrelations and multiple regressions were chosen as the main analysis methods toanalyze the data by using the statistical software SPSS11.5.Results of the experiment indicate that the two researched aspects of lexicalknowledge exert different influence on listening comprehension. On CET4level, bothvocabulary size and depth correlates significantly and positively with listeningcomprehension ability. However, only vocabulary size is a good index of predictinglistening ability. The two aspects of vocabulary depth, meaning and collocation, havepositive correlation with listening comprehension. Compared with collocation, meaning of DVK makes more contribution to predicting listening comprehensionability.