The Effects Of Vocational College Students’ Breadth And Depth Of English Vocabulary Knowledge On Reading Proficiency

Vocabulary is the essential building block of a language. Vocabulary learning is critical tolanguage leaning and is heavily implicated in all practical language skills. Vocabulary knowledgecan be studied from two basic dimensions, i.e. breadth and depth. At present, a number of studiedhave related on the influence of vocabulary size on reading proficiency. Little recognition isaccorded to the roles of other aspects of word knowledge in L2reading.The present study empirically investigates the effect of vocabulary knowledge, especiallythe depth knowledge, on reading comprehension in Chinese EFL context. Vocabulary knowledgetests and reading comprehension tests are administered to110second-year non-English majorsfrom Guangdong AIB Polytechnic College. All participants’ vocabulary size is measure viaVocabulary Level Test (Nation,1990). Four context-dependent sub-tests are used to assess theirfour aspects of in-depth knowledge: synonymy, polysemy, derivation and collocation. Subjects’general reading proficiency is measured by CET-4reading comprehension test. In addition, abackground questionnaire is employed to obtain students general background information. SPSS16.0(Statistical Package for the Social Sciences) is used to conduct Pearson correlation analysisand multiple regression analysis on the scores of all tests.The study finds that good readers’ breadth and depth knowledge is significantly correlatedwith each other. There are also high and positive interrelations existing between breadth,particularly depth of vocabulary knowledge and reading proficiency as the Pearson correlationcoefficients obtained for the variable pairs are.663and.821(p <.05). In addition to theprediction provided by scores on vocabulary size test, scores on vocabulary depth test can makea unique contribution to the prediction of the general reading proficiency. Among the fouraspects of depth knowledge, word meaning and collocation is more highly and positivelycorrelated with reading ability than collocation competence.The findings from this study not only confirm the significance of enlarging vocabulary sizein successful reading comprehension, but also arouse more attention on improving depth ofvocabulary knowledge in EFL learners’ learning processes. It is suggested that in addition to theimprovement of vocabulary size, L2vocabulary instruction should also pay attention to varioustypes of vocabulary knowledge such as lexical meaning, morphological and syntacticalproperties and association etc. It is expected that with further elaboration, this study could result in more significant new insights for second language vocabulary instruction and improvement ofreading learning.