Empirical Study On Influence Of Vocabulary Strength On Listening Test

Vocabulary knowledge is a crucial component in the English language learning, and it is also the basis of other skills. For example, vocabulary knowledge is the foundation of listening. As long as you learned every word in a conversation, you can understand the meaning of other people. As one aspect of vocabulary knowledge, vocabulary strength, including four modalities-active recall, passive recall, active recognition and passive recognition, is defined by Laufer (1997).So far many scholars have conducted various researches into vocabulary due to its importance in communication. But few people have performed experiments upon the correlation between the vocabulary and listening test, especially the correlation between vocabulary strength and listening test. Therefore, the hierarchy of the four modalities of vocabulary strength and the correlation between vocabulary strength and listening test in an overall view and in varying listening proficiency levels are investigated on the basis of a quantitative study in this thesis.Sixty-three freshmen of BUPT (Beijing University of Posts and Telecommunications), majoring in Electronic and Information Engineering, have participated in this study. The subjects are further divided into 3 groups, including groups of low, middle and high listening proficiency levels according to their final-term listening test scores. Four vocabulary tests designed for the testing of different modalities of vocabulary strength and one final-term listening test are adopted as instruments in this study. One-way ANOVA analysis and descriptive statistics of central tendency and dispersion are used to prove the difficulty hierarchy of the four strength modalities. The correlation between the four modalities and final-term listening test is tested by Pearson Correlation coefficient analysis. After analyzing and comparing all data we attained from this study, main findings of this study are as follows:1. A significant hierarchy of difficulty of vocabulary strength modalities does exist, with the sequence as active recall>passive recall>active recognition>passive recognition. Active recall test is the most difficult test while the passive recall test is the easiest one. This result is also valid in three groups of varying listening proficiency levels.2. The correlation coefficient between the four modalities and listening test is significant and the correlation coefficient between passive recall and listening test is the highest among the four modalities. The data show that the sequence of correlations is the same in the overall analysis and the groups of middle and high listening proficiency levels,is Test 2>Test 1>Test 3>Test 4. However, the sequence of correlation in low listening proficiency level group is Test 2>Test 4>Test 1>Test 3.At the end of the paper, the author suggests second language learners pay more attention to studying vocabulary, especially the productive and active knowledge of vocabulary. And teachers should do a better job in introducing more productive practices into classroom, pushing students to use vocabulary more productively, and accelerating the learning of more difficult modalities. Moreover, it is thus worthwhile for teachers to check the levels of listening ability of students, so as to provide different training measures accordingly to help those who need it.