A Case Study Of Relationship Between Vocabulary Knowledge,Translating Competence And Comprehensive English Ability

Vocabulary learning occupies an extraordinarily important part in language learning, therefore, vocabulary acquisition is one of the hottest research fields in SLA. The researches have touched the breadth and depth of vocabulary knowledge as well as vocabulary acquisition strategy.Translating competence, can reflect English majors’ comprehensive English ability which includes listening, speaking, reading and writing. It is believed that it has close relationship with English majors’ comprehensive English ability.Eighty two junior English majors from a non-key comprehensive university which is not included in211or985universities and colleges in China participating in the current research take the Productive Vocabulary Levels Test, Receptive Vocabulary Levels Test and the mock test of China Accreditation Test for Translator-Level3which are applied to measure participants’ productive and receptive vocabulary size as well as their translating competence. All the data from the tests and their scores of TEM4then are analyzed with the Descriptive Statistics, the Pearson Correlation and the Regression Analysis of SPSS16.0.The current research reveals the characteristics of participants’ vocabulary size and their translating competence as well as the relationship between their vocabulary size and their comprehensive English ability, the relationship between their translating competence and comprehensive English ability.The findings of the current research demonstrate that participants perform better in receptive vocabulary size test than in productive vocabulary size test, and the findings also indicate there is significant correlation between participants’ productive vocabulary size and their comprehensive English ability. The result indicates that participants’ productive vocabulary size can predict19%of changes of their comprehensive English ability of the3000vocabulary frequency bands, and of that of the5000vocabulary frequency bands, the percentage is39.5%, which means participants’productive vocabulary size on this level has a great influence on their comprehensive English ability. However, there is slight correlation between participants’receptive vocabulary size and their comprehensive English ability. In terms of the correlation between participants’translating competence and their comprehensive English ability, the significance does exist. And the participants’ English-Chinese translating competence can predict19.8%of changes of their comprehensive English ability, while participants’Chinese-English translating competence can predict14.5%of changes of their comprehensive English ability.In closing, the thesis proposes some advice to help strengthen participants’ comprehensive English ability through the enhancement of their vocabulary size and translating competence. In addition, the analysis of limitations of the current research is also included.