An Investigation Into The Correlation Between Vocabulary Size And Reading Comprehension

" Vocabulary is an essential building block of language"(Norbert Schmitt, Diane Schmitt, and Caroline Clapham,2001). Vocabulary is the crucial foundation of the basic language skills, such as reading, listening, speaking and writing, etc. in EFL (English as Foreign Language) learning. According to the Syllabus of "Extensive Reading Ⅱ" conducted by National Higher Education Self-taught Examination Center of the Ministry of Education, self-taught students of English are required to recognize the number of5,000to6,000vocabulary size, of which they can have a good command of2,000to3,000words, so as to read the difficult-medium authentic English passages. As a result, how to make students reach up to the requirements conducted by the Syllabus of Reading has urged me to look for whether vocabulary size is an important factor influential in students’ poor performance on reading comprehension in EFL learning, and to do the present study of this thesis. Researches on the correlation between vocabulary size and reading comprehension have drawn much attention and reached great achievements in the past decades at home and abroad in L2(Second Language) Acquisition Study, while, there’s an absence of research based on students from Higher Education Self-taught College. The present study, theoretically based on the vocabulary knowledge framework put forward by Paul Nation (1990) and David Qian (2002), attempts to investigate the correlation between vocabulary size and reading comprehension on self-taught students of English.In the study,15self-taught sophomores majoring in English, as the subjects, took part in the study. The subjects were administrated eight tests that measure their vocabulary size and their ability in reading comprehension. Three tests to assess learners’ receptive vocabulary size were employed in the study, the first is the Vocabulary Level Test, which is popular with the L2researchers, originally designed by Nation (1983,1990); the second is the New Version of Vocabulary Level Test, revised on the basis of Nation (1983,1990)’s vocabulary test, is designed by Schmitt (Schmitt, Schmitt and Clapham,2001); the third is the Vocabulary Size Test, which is a measurement to determine the number of words L2learners have mastered, originally designed by Nation (Nation and Beglar,2007) as well. The rest tests for reading comprehension were selected from National Higher Education Self-taught Exam for "Extensive Reading Ⅱ"(Oct.,2013; Jan.,2013; Oct.,2012; Jan,2012; Oct.,2011). After three weeks’data collection, the raw data will be analyzed in SPSS19.0(Statistic Package for Social Sciences19.0), and then the processed results will be analyzed with the Pearson Correlation Analysis and the Multiple Regression Analysis, which are dominant statistical techniques to determine the correlation between vocabulary size, as the independent variable, and reading comprehension, as the dependent variable. And the further discussion on the result was made.The analysis results of the present quantitative study suggest two major findings: first, there’s strongly significant correlation between vocabulary size and reading comprehension on these self-taught students of English; second, their performance on reading comprehension is positively affected by vocabulary size, that is to say, the larger vocabulary size the students have, the better scores of reading comprehension they will get, and vice verse.Based on the findings from this empirical study, firstly, it is necessary to for self-taught students of English to pay much attention to expanding vocabulary size; secondly, as teachers, we need to be fully aware of the importance of vocabulary size in the teaching process, and also, we need to provide students with vocabulary learning strategies and reading skills to make them perform well on National Higher Education Self-taught Exam for "Extensive Reading Ⅱ".