A Study On The Correlation Between Receptive Vocabulary Size And Listening Comprehension Among Non-English Major Students

In second language learning,vocabulary knowledge is closely related to many language skills,such as listening comprehension,reading comprehension,oral English,and writing.In the past decades,many researchers both at home and abroad have conducted studies to explore the inter-relationship between vocabulary knowledge and these language skills.Few studies have been conducted to explore the relationship between receptive vocabulary size and listening comprehension.This study aims to explore the correlation between receptive vocabulary size and listening comprehension as well as to what extent can receptive vocabulary size explain the variance in the listening comprehension.Through analyzing the data obtained from Nation and Beglar(2007)'s Vocabulary Size Test which is used to assess students' vocabulary size and the listening part of CET-4 in June 2015 which is used to assess students' listening comprehension ability,the author summarizes the following results.(1)the reliability of vocabulary size test is very high and the coefficient is 0.854,which indicates it is reliable to test the receptive vocabulary size although the participants are different.(2)Regardless of the difference in students' language proficiency level,gender,and major,receptive vocabulary size is closely related with listening comprehension as a whole since the correlation coefficient is 0.846.As for each part of listening comprehension,receptive vocabulary size has a mediate relationship with blank-filling,and short passages,and a weaker relationship with short conversations and long conversations.(3)Vocabulary size can explain 71.6% variance in listening comprehension through linear regression analysis.As for several parts of listening comprehension,it can explain 50.7% variance in blank-filling,37% variance in short passages,18.9% variance in short conversations and 4.1% variance in long conversations.The findings from this empirical study call for more attention to the importance of expanding receptive vocabulary size on improving listening comprehension ability.In second language teaching and learning,it suggests that it is necessary to arouse students' awareness of the large influence of vocabulary size on listening comprehension and teachers should also encourage students to learn the words that are correlated significantly with listening comprehension.