Assessing The Role Of Vocabulary Knowledge In Predicting Listening Comprehension Of College Students

Wilkins (1972:111) believed, without grammar, we could express ourselves limitedly, but without vocabulary, we could express nothing. This thesis explores the relationship between breadth and depth of vocabulary knowledge and listening comprehension in foreign language learning context. Many studies have been conducted on vocabulary acquisition by foreign and domestic scholars, but most of them did not analyze vocabulary knowledge together with listening comprehension. This research, based on the vocabulary knowledge framework put forward by researchers like Nation (1990), Read (1998), Qian (1999, 2002) etc., focuses on vocabulary knowledge types and analyzes them respectively to assess the role of vocabulary knowledge in listening comprehension. This study tries to answer the following questions:1) Are vocabulary size and depth of vocabulary knowledge correlated with listening comprehension?2) Does the breadth of listening vocabulary make a greater contribution to the prediction of listening comprehension?3) Whether or not vocabulary depth could predict listening comprehension? If yes, to what extent could the prediction be?4) How are the relations between vocabulary knowledge and listening comprehension discriminated on the part of successful and less successful college students?In this experiment, the subjects are 175 sophomores from seven non-English-majored classes in Shandong College of Art and Design. The researcher took one test once a week and it took four weeks to finish the tests. Then the researcher collected the scores of the subjects. And finally, the researcher analyzed and compared the four tests results by using SPSS 13.The results support the following conclusions: 1) Subjects' listening vocabulary size is different from their reading vocabulary size, the former is smaller than the latter and they are in direct proportion to each other. 2) Both listening and reading vocabulary size have impact on listening comprehension but the former has more impact. 3) Vocabulary depth is basically not related to listening comprehension. 4) The scores of successful students is far better than that of less successful students and the former's correlation coefficient between vocabulary knowledge and listening comprehension is higher than that of the latter.This empirical study is conducive to vocabulary and listening teaching on the part of EFL teachers, and attaches more importance to improving vocabulary knowledge in EFL learning process from the perspective of EFL learners.