A Study Of The Correlation Between English Majors’ Lexical Quality And Reading Comprehension Proficiency

Vocabulary is recognized as essential to empower reading comprehension proficiency during the whole process of reading. Vocabulary learning advances gradually with learner’s developing ability of word identity. It is not difficult for learners to remember vocabulary in a short time, while it is a long procedure getting to know vocabulary from every perspective of vocabulary such as phonology, orthography and meaning. This thesis sets out to investigate the correlation between English majors’ Lexical Quality and reading comprehension proficiency from three dimensions. The following questions have been put forward in the research.Based on the Perfetti’ Lexical Quality Hypothesis(2007), this thesis reports on three crucial research questions as follows: what is the current situation of English majors’ Lexical Quality and whether there exists correlation between English majors’ Lexical Quality and reading comprehension proficiency and if the correlation exists, which representational property of Lexical Quality has the most correlation with reading comprehension.A research is conducted including 40 junior English majors from the foreign language college of Bohai University. All the subjects have taken the Lexical Quality test and reading comprehension test. The data is analyzed by SPSS 19.0 to testify the correlation between English majors’ Lexical Quality and reading comprehension proficiency. The findings indicate that Lexical Quality and reading comprehension are associated. There exists a significant positive correlation between English majors’ Lexical Quality and reading comprehension. What’s more, among the three representational properties, semantic processing ability and reading comprehension correlates most, and the correlation between orthographic processing ability and reading comprehension is not obvious, while there is a tiny correlation exist between phonetic processing ability and reading comprehension. The result of the study proves that high quality of lexicon could prompt reading comprehension proficiency especially semantic ability has the most correlation with reading comprehension because meaning is very crucial for learners during reading comprehension.According to the results, many pedagogical implications for improving the Lexical Quality and reading comprehension proficiency of English learners, and there are also limitations are discussed at the end of the thesis.