Investigating The Relationship Between Vocabulary And Academic Reading Comprehension In CET4

On English learning, learners and teachers have been paying much attention to the acquisition of vocabulary and the focus is mostly on the size of vocabulary. However, some empirical research has revealed that other dimensions of vocabulary knowledge are also important in English learning. The inconsistency between learners' practice and the results of empirical research led to the author's consideration of the relationship between English learners' vocabulary and their language proficiency levels: how the two are related, what characteristics of words are important to language proficiency? The study investigates the roles of size and depth of vocabulary knowledge in predicting performance in reading tasks for basic comprehension in the context of College English Test Band 4 in China with the aim of conceptually validating the roles of size and depth of vocabulary knowledge in reading comprehension in academic settings.An experiment consisting of three tests, vocabulary size test, test of depth of vocabulary and reading comprehension test was conducted among 65 sophomores. Two-tailed Pearson product-moment correlations and multiple regression were chosen as the main analysis methods for the data. Results of the tests showed that in the CET4 level, although vocabulary size and depth of vocabulary knowledge both correlate with CET4-RBC highly and positively, vocabulary size is much more important than that of depth of vocabulary knowledge in predicting performance on academic reading. The stepwise regression revealed that vocabulary size can make a significant contribution to reading for basiccomprehension while depth of vocabulary knowledge can not. It was also found that the aspects of DVK show different importance in predicting performance on academic reading. Based on the comparison of the present studies with other related studies, it was concluded that the requirements of dimensions of vocabulary knowledge in different English proficiency level are dynamic and a model hypothesis for the relationship between vocabulary size, depth of vocabulary knowledge and reading for basic comprehension was proposed.