Correlation Studies Of Vocabulary Knowledge And Listening Comprehension Of Non-English Major College Students

For the great majority of English learners,one of their essential objectives is to expand their vocabulary knowledge.It is generally believed by many linguistic scholars that grammar is an important tool that we use to convey the sentence meaning,however,vocabulary is the basis of all to convey.The importance of vocabulary knowledge is recognized by more and more English learners.A great quantity of lexical knowledge,including lexical breadth and depth,is prerequisite to the performance of language skills,such as listening,reading and writing.A lot of researches on vocabulary acquisition have been accomplished by foreign and domestic scholars,but most of them didn't probe into the relationship between vocabulary knowledge and listening comprehension.The researcher collects the data and uses the SPSS 18 to analyze it.The result is that there is a relation between the vocabulary knowledge and listening comprehension.This research aims to examine these questions:1)To what extent does vocabulary breadth and depth of lexical knowledge relate to listening comprehension?2)How does the breadth of listening vocabulary take an effect on the prediction of the score of listening comprehension?3)To what extent does vocabulary depth predict the score of listening comprehension?In this research,the subjects are 185 sophomores from six non-English-majored classes in Suqian College.This experiment instrument consists of vocabulary breadth test,vocabulary depth test and listening comprehension test including 2012 CET Band 4 listening comprehension.The subjects take one test every week and the experiment costs four weeks to finish the tests.After the tests,the investigator gathers the scores of each subject.In the end,the investigator compares and analyzes the test data with SPSS 18.The results show that:1)the breadth and depth of vocabulary both relate to listening comprehension,and the extend of the correlation can be generally presented.2)vocabulary breadth knowledge can predict the score of the listening comprehension.And the quantity of subjects' listening vocabulary is different from that of reading vocabulary,and is smaller compared with that of reading vocabulary.the quantity of both listening and reading vocabulary has an influence on the listening comprehension.3)vocabulary depth knowledge is closely related to listening comprehension and can predict the score of the listening comprehension.The findings in this empirical study are not only instructive to listening and vocabulary teaching on the part of EFL teachers,but also call for recognition of the importance of improving lexical knowledge in EFL learning process from EFL learners' point of view.