Relationship Between English Vocabulary Knowledge And Listening Comprehension Of Chinese Efl Learners At Different Proficiency Levels

Undoubtedly, vocabulary knowledge plays an important part in English. It has been proved to be a reliable predictor of a student’s overall performance. But research on vocabulary knowledge and language skills has almost overwhelmingly focused on the skills of reading and writing and few studies have uncovered the relationship between vocabulary knowledge and listening comprehension. Besides, it is still unclear whether learners’ proficiency will exert an influence on the correlation between their vocabulary knowledge and listening comprehension. So, the current study is an attempt to explore the role of vocabulary knowledge in listening comprehension performance of students with different proficiency levels. Based on vocabulary knowledge framework put forward by Nation(1990), Read(1993), Qian(1999), Zareva(2004), etc., the study adopts three-dimensional model of vocabulary knowledge and tries to analyze their roles in listening comprehension respectively. The three dimensions of vocabulary knowledge are breadth of vocabulary knowledge(BVK), depth of vocabulary knowledge(DVK) and metacognitive awareness vocabulary knowledge(MAVK). MAVK includes two parts--self-reported vocabulary knowledge(SRVK) and verified vocabulary knowledge(VVK).In this study, the participants are from 8 intact classes in a university, including 92 first-year English majors and 70 third-year English majors. They are asked to do four pen-and-paper tests: breadth of vocabulary knowledge test, depth of vocabulary knowledge test, metacognitive awareness test and CET-6 listening comprehension test. The scores of the participants are later input into SPSS 19.0 for further comparison and analysis.The major findings are as follows: 1) Regardless of students’ proficiency levels, BVK relates higher with listening comprehension(LC) than DVK, SRVK and VVK. For the third-year students, the three dimensions of vocabulary knowledge are all correlated with LC. For the first-year students, only BVK and SRVK are correlated with LC. 2) The predictive power of vocabulary knowledge to LC of the third-year students is stronger than that of the first-year students. The three dimensions of vocabulary knowledge together can predict 25% of the variance in the listening scores for the third-year students and 15.9% of the variance in the listening scores for the first-year students. 3) In regard to the correlation between BVK and DVK, the two variables are not correlated in the group of the third-year students. However, for the first-year participants, the two aspects are correlated. As to metacognitive awareness, its two parts-- SRVK and VVK are positively and highly correlated in both two groups, which is similar to the findings of Zareva(2004).The findings of the study are helpful to listening and vocabulary teaching and learning. Since BVK correlates the most with LC no matter at what proficiency levels the students are, students should attach more importance to their vocabulary acquisition and make use of BVK to improve their LC. For students in the third-year, they can also improve their LC by expanding DVK and VVK.Besides, when students learn vocabulary, teachers should instruct them to know the significance of learning in-depth vocabulary knowledge rather than simply memorizing the superficial word meaning. As to students in the third-year, their BVK did not meet the English teaching syllabus for English majors(2000), so it is advisable that they should enlarge their vocabulary size. At the same time, they should also expand their DVK. For the first-year students, though they have a large vocabulary size and BVK is correlated with DVK, it is not statistically significant. Therefore, they should try to increase their DVK.