A Study Of The Correlation Between The Vocabulary Size And The English Reading Comprehension Of Senior High-school Students

Language has been invested with so great a power since ancient times that every human being strives to make the best use of it. As a global language in this highly globalized era, English has become a fairly significant tool for communication. Undoubtedly considered to be the most important component of language, vocabulary functions as the basis for language learning. The vocabulary size, to a certain degree, can determine the result of expressing or understanding information in English.Besides vocabulary, reading equally plays a key role in impacting upon language competence. At the same time, the relationship between vocabulary and reading has gradually absorbed researchers’ attention: vocabulary size is of vital significance to the students’ reading comprehension ability and their level of English learning. For the vast majority of the students, it is the vocabulary size that is the chief reason why they cannot achieve satisfying result in English reading comprehension.Starting from the year of 1978, there have occurred tremendous research accomplishments in the field of English vocabulary by Chinese researchers. Much to our disappointment, however, insufficient studies have touched upon the vocabulary size of middle school students in the minority borderlands of mainland China, especially the correlations between the identifiable/productive vocabulary size and the reading comprehension on the part of the senior high school students in the ethnic areas. It is against this backdrop that the author of this thesis makes a tentative attempt to fathom out their inner relationship.Making use of “the Electronic Evaluation System for the Vocabulary Size of English Learners in China” which was designed and developed by Professor Yang Duanhe, this research endeavors to offer an analysis of the correlations between the identifiable/productive vocabulary size and the reading comprehension ability. Choosing 96 Senior Grade Three students from two different classes in Kaiyuan No. 4 Middle School(hereinafter KYN4MS), Honghe Hani-Yi Autonomous Prefecture, who are about to take part in the College Entrance Examination of China, this research implements two tests of vocabulary size and reading comprehension ability, before and after the 6-month experimental teaching. The test materials are Reading Comprehension questions in College Entrance Examination, and the software of SPSS(Statistics Package for Social Science) 10.0 is used to make an analytic Pair-Samples T Test on the statistics. The method of the Pearson Correlation is applied during the research.After a research and a data analysis lasting a whole semester, this paper comes to the following conclusions:1)The vocabulary sizes of the tested Senior Grade Three high-school students from two different classes are as follows:The productive vocabulary size is 546.6 words for Science Class One, and 393.4 words for Arts Class Seven. The identifiable vocabulary size is 2116.9 words for Science Class One, and 1762.9 words for Arts Class Seven. These results show that the average vocabulary size of Science Class One and Arts Class Seven is far from the requirements of the Examination Syllabus of the college entrance examination.2)There is a positive correlation between students’ vocabulary size and students’ reading ability(either in Science Class One or Arts Class Seven).The correlations between the productive vocabulary size and the pre-/post-reading ability of Science Class One are 0.757 and 0.812 respectively at 0.01 levels. The correlations between identifiable vocabulary size and pre-/post-reading ability are 0.860 and 0.919 respectively at 0.01 levels.The correlations between the productive vocabulary size and the pre-/post-reading ability of Arts Class Seven are 0.516 and 0.770 respectively at 0.01 levels. The correlations between the identifiable vocabulary size and the pre-/post-reading ability are 0.813 and 0.884 respectively at 0.01 levels.Compared with the correlation between the productive vocabulary size and the reading comprehension result, the one between the identifiable vocabulary size and the reading comprehension ability is more significant.3)There is a significant difference of these two reading comprehension tests taken before and after implementing the experimental teaching of vocabulary strategies(both in Science Class One and Arts Class Seven), that is, Sig.(2-tailed) = 0.000 <0.01(significance level) in Science Class One and Sig.(2-tailed) = 0.060≈0.05(significance level) in Arts Class Seven. It is suggested that the reading scores of Science Class One are more significant.4)The average score of reading comprehension for Science Class One increases from 9.68 to 15.92 and the average score for Arts Class Seven increases from 9.1304 to 10.8696. From the above-mention statistics, we can see that the improvement of reading comprehension result for Arts Class Seven is still not significant, even though its vocabulary size has been substantially increased. This reveals that the score of reading comprehension is also affected by other different factors.