A Correlative Research On The Relationship Between Vocabulary And Reading Comprehension In English Teaching In High Schools

How can we improve the students'ability of English reading comprehension? In the past, we paid much attention to grammar and analysis of the sentence structure, ignoring comprehension of the real expression meaning. With China entry into WTO, communicating with the other countries in science, technology and trade is becoming wider, therefore, a lot of English words with varying characteristics are appearing, among which sometimes we are not sure whether we can get the key meaning in the dictionary. Vocabulary knowledge is the key of reading comprehension but the method of enlarging it is paid little attention to.Theoretically, this paper analyses and applies three kinds of learning vocabulary methods to help clear away the barriers in reading comprehension, and tackles the problem of inefficient reading comprehension of high school students with the teaching method of lexicon teaching. This paper trains students to acquire"discourse competence"and improves reading comprehension. The three methods include context, context of culture, patterns of lexis in text.Meanwhile, this paper reports an inquiring study of relationship between vocabulary knowledge and reading comprehension. After the Pearson correlation analysis, it is found: Richer vocabulary knowledge, stronger reading comprehension. Vocabulary knowledge and reading comprehension are highly and positively correlated with each other. The result shows the relation is a very low correlation. Yet it is still interesting, to some degree, meaningful in the sense that one simple variable (vocabulary knowledge) seems to explain at least the highly complex variable (reading comprehension). The study is of great significance, very instructive and practical to English teaching in high schools.