A Research On The Relationship Between Vocabulary Knowledge And Listening Comprehension Among English Majors

Vocabulary knowledge is an oft-used term in the field of second language acquisition, and its two primary dimensions—vocabulary size(also called breadth of vocabulary knowledge) and depth of vocabulary knowledge have been universally acknowledged. The former counts as the basic component of a learner’s lexical competence, referring to the size of a learner’s vocabulary, or rather, the number of words for which the learner has at least some knowledge of meaning(Staehr, 2009).On the contrary, depth of vocabulary knowledge is indicative of the quality of one’s lexical knowledge, and it reflects the degree of depth to which a learner knows individual words. In recent decades, plenty of studies have been carried out to investigate the relationship between vocabulary knowledge and English proficiency(particularly in reading comprehension) and most of them demonstrated a high correlation between the two(e.g., Laufer, 1992; Qian, 1999, 2002, etc.). Likewise, we presume that the same may apply equally to the comprehension of aural texts.However, quite a limited quantity of studies have touched upon this issue and discrepancies exist among the results, if any. Given this, further investigations are needed to explore the role of vocabulary knowledge in listening comprehension.To be specific, this dissertation aims to address the questions below:(1) Is there a correlation between vocabulary size and listening comprehension in general as well as its individual parts? If yes, to what extent are they correlated?(2) Is there a correlation between depth of vocabulary knowledge and listening comprehension in general as well as its individual parts? If yes, to what extent are they correlated?(3) Does depth of vocabulary knowledge, in addition to vocabulary size, explain the variance in general listening comprehension as well as its individual parts? If yes, to what extent can vocabulary knowledge predict them?In the present experiment, participants are 117 sophomore English majors from Foreign Languages College of a certain university, and they have similar educational backgrounds. Within a week, three paper-and-pencil tests(a TEM4 listening comprehension test, a vocabulary size test, and a test targeting the depth of vocabulary knowledge) were administered successively. Having collected the scores on each test, the researcher analyzed the data by utilizing SPSS19.0. Analysesincluding descriptive statistics, Pearson correlation analysis and regression analysis were conducted to explore the research questions.The results are presented as follows:(1) Vocabulary size is significantly associated with the total scores on listening comprehension(TSL for short) and its four individual parts.(2) Depth of vocabulary knowledge also demonstrate a significant correlation with TSL and its four individual parts.(3) Vocabulary size and depth of vocabulary knowledge could explain to various degrees the variance in TSL,scores on dictation part and scores on conversation; moreover, only vocabulary size serves as a reliable predictor in the TSL and scores on passage.Doubtless to say, the findings have some pedagogical implications for the EFL teachers in the teaching of listening. Given the essential role vocabulary knowledge plays in listening performance, more attention should be paid to the expanding of vocabulary size and depth of vocabulary knowledge.