A Probe Into The Relationship Between English Vocabulary Knowledge And Reading Competence For High School Students

Due to the changes in the test, the percentage for the reading-based grammar, vocabulary and reading comprehension accounts for almost half of the total, among which reading comprehension makes up nearly one-third of it. To meet these challenges, it is important for senior three students to improve their reading competence. Besides, the research on the relationship between vocabulary size and reading has been on the rise home and abroad over the past decade. Besides, some scholars have shifted their focus on the relationship between the depth of vocabulary and reading. Although some studies suggest that the vocabulary knowledge correlates with reading, their subjects fail to involve high school students in China, and some reading measures are not suitable for them as well.Hence, this paper probes into the relationship between English vocabulary knowledge and reading competence for high school students, which aims at the providing a new mode for reading class, drawn from the relationship between vocabulary knowledge and reading comprehension in the test and that between vocabulary knowledge and each section from reading part in the test, including cloze, multiple choice, and questions and answers, through VLT, WAT and the reading section from the second practice examination 2015 Changning for senior three students. In addition, there is qualitative research on this subject in this paper as well. These results will help reconstruct the vocabulary class and reading class.It has been found from the paper that English vocabulary knowledge is closely related to reading comprehension and can predict reading performance, through probing the relationship among the breadth of the vocabulary, the depth of the vocabulary and reading comprehension. To be more exact, compared with the depth of the vocabulary, the breadth of the vocabulary is more closely connected with reading. Furthermore, the paper also indicates that the breadth of the vocabulary correlates with the depth of the vocabulary. Another disco very is that the vocabulary size is highly relative to the performance in cloze and multiple choice and is predictable in both reading sections while the depth of vocabulary has something to do with cloze, and questions and answers.The result of the questionnaire reflects that teachers can improve students’ reading competence by enlarging their vocabulary. Meanwhile, vocabulary plays a different role in various sections of the reading test. Hence, teachers should take other factors such as logic, reading strategies, grammar and background knowledge into consideration as well so that students can be expected to perform well in reading.