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

As the cornerstone of language and one of the three basic elements of language,vocabulary plays a vital role in language learning and teaching.Understanding and mastering vocabulary knowledge is one of the key tasks of foreign language learners.Reading,as the main skill in English learning,has a close relationship with vocabulary knowledge.In order to further study the relationship between vocabulary knowledge and reading comprehension performance,this study is based on the vocabulary knowledge framework established by Qian(2002)and chooses the four hypotheses about the effect of vocabulary knowledge on reading put forward by Anderson and Freebody(1981)and Mezynski(1983)as the theoretical basis to address the questions below:(1)What is the relationship between breadth and depth of vocabulary knowledge?(2)Breadth or depth,which one is more closely related to reading comprehension performance?(3)To what extent does the breadth and depth of vocabulary knowledge respectively and as a whole contributes to predicting the performance of reading comprehension?This study chooses 82 sophomores of English major from a certain university as the participants.The instruments applied in this study are three tests with high reliability and validity for testing breadth and depth of vocabulary knowledge and reading comprehension performance.Vocabulary Levels Test revised by Schmitt(2001)is used for testing breadth of vocabulary knowledge,Word Associates Test invented by Read(1998)is used for testing depth of vocabulary knowledge and the reading comprehension section of TEM 4(2015)is used for testing the performance of reading comprehension.The test results are used as the raw data and analyzed by the Pearson correlation analysis and Multiple regression analysis program provided by the SPSS20.0 software.Through the analysis of the data,the following results are obtained.First,there is a significant positive correlation between vocabulary breadth and depth knowledge.Second,vocabulary breadth and vocabulary depth are both positively correlated with reading comprehension performance,and breadth is more closely related to reading comprehension performance.Third,breadth and depth can both effectively predictreading achievement and breadth has greater predictive power for reading comprehension performance than vocabulary depth;while they can predict the performance of reading comprehension more effectively when working together as a whole.The results of the study reconfirm the importance of the breadth of vocabulary knowledge in reading comprehension performance and at the same time,affirm the position of the depth of vocabulary knowledge in it.The progressing of vocabulary knowledge not only requires the increase of quantity but also the promotion of the quality.