The Impact Of Vocabulary Knowledge And Syntactic Awareness On Junior Middle School Students' English Reading Proficiency

Reading is an essential but complicated point in English learning and teaching,which attracts most attention from teachers and researchers.However,the traditional instruction method still plays a ruling part in reading teaching in junior middle school in China,which focuses on a sole aspect of reading knowledge,such as words or grammar,without concerning the effects of word knowledge and syntactic awareness from the perspective of linguistics and cognition;and without concerning which is the most effective factor to junior middle school students' English reading proficiency.This not only deviates reading instruction from the requirements of the new English curriculum standard,but also to a poor teaching and learning effects,and the students' reading proficiency will hardly be improved effectively.Studies prove that reading comprehension depends on the quality of vocabulary representation in learner's brain,while the success of vocabulary reading or decoding is to a great extent dependent on learners' metalinguistic awareness such as syntactic awareness(Gough & Tumner,1986;Hoover & Gough,1990).Therefore,after doing some theoretical researches,this study will take a full account of the differences of reading subjects,exploring the impact of vocabulary knowledge and syntactic awareness to junior middle school students' English reading comprehension from the Componential Model of Reading theory in the domain of cognitive psychology.And the thesis seeks to answer the following questions:(1)Are there any significant effects of vocabulary knowledge,syntactic awareness on junior middle school students' English reading proficiency?(2)Which factor will influence junior middle school students' English reading proficiency most,vocabulary knowledge or syntactic awareness?(3)What are the prediction effects of vocabulary knowledge and syntactic awareness on junior middle school students' English reading proficiency?The 67 subjects of this study are first-year junior middle school students,and thebehavior research method is adopted.The instruments employed to measure participants' performance included a Reading Anxiety questionnaire,a syntactic awareness test,a vocabulary size test,a vocabulary depth test and a reading comprehension test.Data collected for the present study are obtained via individual test and the paper-pencil tests.These tests are administered in two parallel classes in two weeks.SPSS 21.0 is employed for data analysis.And independent samples T-test,correlation analyses and regression analyses methods are implemented respectively.Below are the research results.1 There is significant effect of vocabulary knowledge and syntactic awareness on junior middle school students' English reading proficiency.2 Through controlling the factor of emotion(reading anxiety)and linguistic factors(vocabulary knowledge and syntactic awareness),the study finds that the most effective factor to junior middle school students' reading proficiency is vocabulary knowledge.3 The predictive power of vocabulary knowledge and syntactic awareness is worked out through Stepwise Regression Analyzes.And the study also finds the vocabulary size,one factor of vocabulary knowledge,has the best predictive effects to junior middle school students' reading proficiency.The findings of this study highlight the importance of vocabulary knowledge and then syntactic awareness to reading proficiency.It is significant both theoretically and practically.Theoretically,this study enriches the empirical reading research in L2 context and corroborates the applicability of the componential reading approach.Practically,it provides significant implications for reading instruction and curriculum design.As a result,teachers are advised to modify their class activities and curriculum guidelines by combining different factors into the reading teaching activities,especially considering the over-all aspects of vocabulary knowledge.