Impact Of Non-English Majors' Vocabulary Knowledge On Reading Comprehension In ESL

L2 (second language) vocabulary acquisition, as an important component in Second Language Acquisition, has recently been attached much importance in the field. Research on L2 vocabulary acquisition usually goes into two approaches, namely, quantitative one and qualitative one. The former looks into the expansion of vocabulary size (breadth of vocabulary knowledge), which has gained much attention and achievements in the past decades; while, the latter explores the development of various dimensions of an individual word (depth of vocabulary knowledge), which has received limited attention from SLA (second language acquisition) researchers, resulting in little understanding of the importance of aspects of L2 vocabulary knowledge. The present study, based on the vocabulary knowledge framework proposed by Nation (1990), attempts to investigate the relationship between breadth and depth of vocabulary knowledge and reading comprehension in ESL (English as a second language) for non-English majors.In the study, 87 second-year non-English majors, as the participants of the study, recruited randomly from three specialties in a university. The participants were admimstrated three tests that measure vocabulary size, depth of vocabulary knowledge and reading comprehension. Of the three tests, the test of depth of vocabulary knowledge mainly focused on the two respects of a given word: meaning and collocation. Within three weeks' data collection, the raw data were analyzed with Pearson correlation and multiple regression as dominant statistical techniques, and the analyses were conducted with SPSS 11.0. And the further discussion on the results was made.The results of the study showed that the intercorrelations among the...