The Relationship Between Vocabulary Knowledge And Reading Comprehension

Vocabulary is regarded as the building block of language,which plays a crucial role in foreign language learning and teaching.A sound knowledge of vocabulary and a big size of it are the major tasks for foreign language learners.Reading has a close relationship with vocabulary knowledge.Vocabulary knowledge and reading are two aspects of the English language or abilities that confront both students and teachers.Based on the theoretical framework of vocabulary knowledge set up by Qian(2002),this study intends to investigate the exact correlation between vocabulary knowledge and reading comprehension.The subjects are students from one class in Grade 2 of a senior high school.They are given tests three times on vocabulary width knowledge,vocabulary depth knowledge and reading comprehension competence.The scores of the three tests are used as the data for analyzing the correlation between vocabulary and reading comprehension.Statistical Package for the Social Sciences 16.0 is used to make Pearson correlation analysis and Multi Regression analysis to explore the correlation between vocabulary and reading comprehension.The subjects in this study are the students taught by the author.Their English proficiency is equivalent to College English Band 4.All the testing papers are designed with reference to this English level.Vocabulary width test was designed by the author based on Nation's Vocabulary Levels Test(VLT)with words selected from glossary of College English Band 4.Vocabulary depth included three aspects-one was adapted from Read's Word Associates Format.The words that suit students' levels are chosen.The other two are word synonym test and antonym test.The reading comprehension test was taken from two parts of College English Test Band 4:cloze section and reading comprehension section.The results of data analysis show that:(1)depth of vocabulary knowledge and reading comprehension have positive and comparatively significant correlation;(2)width of vocabulary knowledge and reading comprehension also have positive correlation,yet the correlation coefficient rate is not high;(3)vocabulary width and vocabulary depth have positive and comparatively significant correlation;(4)both depth of vocabulary knowledge and width of vocabulary knowledge can effectively predict the scores of reading comprehension.The results of this research further proves the importance of vocabulary knowledge in reading comprehension and the decisive role of depth of vocabulary knowledge in reading comprehension.For teachers and students of senior high school,they must not only focus on the increase of vocabulary size,but also deepen their vocabulary knowledge so that their vocabulary knowledge can develop in a balanced way to achieve good reading comprehension.