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A Study On The Relationship Between Vocabulary Knowledge And Listening Comprehension Among English Majors

Posted on:2019-07-13Degree:MasterType:Thesis
Country:ChinaCandidate:L FangFull Text:PDF
GTID:2415330545971470Subject:Second Language Acquisition
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Vocabulary knowledge constitutes an indispensable part of the development of language skills.Furthermore,vocabulary breadth and vocabulary depth are universally discussed as the two fundamental dimensions of vocabulary knowledge research,which remain the hottest research area in SLA.The majority of previous studies focus on the relation between vocabulary and reading comprehension.That of vocabulary and listening comprehension tends to be ignored owing to its complex comprehension process.Hence,the current thesis,based on the vocabulary knowledge framework by Nation(1990,2001),attempts to investigate the relationship between vocabulary breadth,vocabulary depth and listening comprehension.Accordingly,three research questions are depicted as follows:1)What is the overall picture of breadth and depth of vocabulary knowledge of sophomore English majors?2)What is the relationship between breadth and depth of vocabulary knowledge?3)What is the correlation among breadth of vocabulary knowledge,depth of vocabulary knowledge and listening comprehension?To explore the influence of vocabulary knowledge on listening,87 sophomores,from a provincial university,are chosen as the subjects.Besides,vocabulary levels test and depth of vocabulary knowledge test are adopted to measure the vocabulary levels of participants.Meanwhile,scores of end-of-term listening examination are taken as dependent variable.By virtue of SPSS 20.0,descriptive analysis,along with Two-tailed Pearson Correlations and Multiple Regression Analysis,has been conducted to reveal several results below.1)English majors are in hierarchical levels of vocabulary knowledge and universally achieve better results in vocabulary breadth than vocabulary depth.They pay more attention to the mastery of vocabulary quantity,thus overlooking some other in-depth aspects in recognizing vocabulary.2)Breadth of vocabulary knowledge is moderately related with vocabulary depth.Moreover,vocabulary breadth can explain a percentage of 17.1% variance in depth of vocabulary knowledge.3)Both vocabulary breadth and vocabulary depth are highly correlated with listeningcomprehension.There is moderately stronger correlation between vocabulary breadth and listening.In addition,despite the fact that both the two vocabulary categories can predict listening scores from various proportion,the predictive power of vocabulary breadth(25.8%)is slightly stronger than that of vocabulary depth(22.5%).Nevertheless,it has been testified that the two sides do not function on listening separately but contribute interactively to listening performance,with a prediction of33.7% variance in listening scores in total.Research results in this study provide significant implications for listening teaching and vocabulary teaching in the Chinese context.It is quite necessary to highlight the pivotal role of vocabulary knowledge in listening performance.Therefore,not only vocabulary enlargement but also mastery of other vocabulary aspects in-depth is required for language learners,so as to maximize the influence of vocabulary on listening comprehension.
Keywords/Search Tags:vocabulary knowledge, vocabulary breadth, vocabulary depth, listening comprehension
PDF Full Text Request
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