A Study Of Senior High School Students’ English Listening And Reading Vocabulary

The study on English vocabulary has long been considered as a very hot topic in the field of Second Language Acquisition research.Many researchers throughout the world continuously have discovered some new perspectives about vocabulary acquisition so as to find out more effective ways of learning vocabulary.Moreover,various kinds of tools for measurement and different research methods are often employed in their researches in order to further study vocabulary teaching,which also promote the development of some other relevant researches concerning this field.After searching and reading a large sum of relevant articles available,especially those written by experts in this field both at home and abroad,the author gets to know that the research about English vocabulary learning is in its full swing,however,when we narrow the perspective of vocabulary learning and focus on reading vocabulary and listening vocabulary,the research of both kinds decreases rapidly and the former one is more than the latter one.Besides,in senior high school English teaching practice,such cases as follows occurs occasionally,when we mention a certain word,students can catch its meaning as soon as they read it,however,they often fail to understand the word only through listening.The author assumes that one possible reason should account for such phenomenon,that is,the level of students’ listening vocabulary is far lower than that of their reading vocabulary.With the purpose of verifying whether the quantity of students’ listening vocabulary is much less than the quantity of students’ reading vocabulary and finding out the correlation between them,114 students,who are from two parallel classes of grade one in a well-known senior high school located in the urban distribute of Zhangzhou,are selected as the test objects in this study.Each class has 57 students.In this study,a vocabulary proficiency test and two sets of tests which are made up of listening and reading practice,are adopted as the measurement tool for collecting original data.Then the SPSS 21.0 is used to process the collective data and produce descriptive statistics and then carry out the correlation analysis.At the same time,the students are divided into several groups according to their levels of general vocabulary proficiency so that the author can find out the change of certain correlation between the students’ listening vocabulary and reading vocabulary,which can be analyzed with the help of some relevant theories(One is the Input Theory of Krashen and the other is Information Processing Theory).Therefore,this study attempts to solve the following four problems:(1)What is the difference between students’ listening vocabulary and reading vocabulary?(2)What effects may lexical difficulty does on students’ levels of listening vocabulary and reading vocabulary?(3)As for the amount of listening vocabulary and reading vocabulary,what differences might exists among students of different general vocabulary levels?(4)What is the correlation between students’ levels of listening vocabulary and reading vocabulary?Through data analysis,the author finds that:(1)Senior high school students are relatively short of listening vocabulary,and their general level of listening vocabulary is much lower than that of their reading vocabulary;(2)Students’ levels of general vocabulary,listening vocabulary and reading vocabulary will decease as the levels of lexical difficulty increase;(3)Students whose levels of general vocabulary are higher have a relatively larger amount of both listening vocabulary and reading vocabulary,there exists a positive correlation between them;(4)There exists a significant positive correlation between students’ levels of listening vocabulary and reading vocabulary,and the degree of such correlation will decrease when the levels of lexical difficulty increase.Based on the above findings and the two basic theories of this study(One is the Input Theory of Krashen and the other is Information Processing Theory),this paper puts forward some practical suggestions on English vocabulary teaching for senior high school,such as adding some requirements on listening vocabulary to the curriculum criteria,providing more listening input for students,paying more attention to the right pronunciation of words,attaching much more importance to the pronunciation of words while trying to catch the form and meaning of words,and employing a variety of methods to enhance the teaching of listening vocabulary etc.Only in this way can we help students to successfully transform their reading vocabulary into listening vocabulary and enlarge their listening vocabulary,can we help students to overcome some lexical barriers while listening and improve their listening ability,and can we help them to narrow the gap between their proficiency of listening vocabulary and reading vocabulary,which would finally make students’ proficiency of both reading vocabulary and listening vocabulary get a more balanced improvement.