A Study On The Relationship Between Vocabulary Knowledge And Senior High School Students’ Listening Comprehension

Among the four basic language learning skills,listening has always been regarded as one of the important input sources for learners.However,studies on listening have not been attached importance until recently.Now the factors influencing listening comprehension are one of hot topics.These factors are divided into two categories: linguistic knowledge and non-linguistic information.Linguistic knowledge is related to languages themselves,such as vocabulary,grammar and syntax.Non-linguistic information includes real-world knowledge,background knowledge and some information about the context and topic(Buck,2001;Vandergrift & Baker,2015).Abundant researches(e.g.Rubin,1994;Goh,2000;Graham et al.2008;Andringa et al.2012;Vandergrift & Baker,2015)about the effect of non-linguistic information on listening comprehension have been explored.However,the investigations into whether linguistic knowledge can influence listening comprehension are relatively limited,especially the researches about the effect of vocabulary knowledge on listening comprehension(e.g.Bonk,2000;St?hr,2009;Zhang,2011;Zhao,2017).And research findings suggest that aural vocabulary knowledge can best predict a listener’s listening comprehension proficiency(e.g.Milton et al.2006;Cheng & Matthews,2018;Masrai,2020).In addition,the researches at home ignore the effect of vocabulary knowledge on senior high school students’ listening comprehension.According to Nation’s vocabulary classification(1990),this thesis explores the effect of students’ vocabulary knowledge on their listening comprehension in terms of productive/aural vocabulary,productive/written vocabulary,receptive/aural vocabulary and receptive/written vocabulary.The instruments consist of the adapted partial diction test,controlled-production vocabulary levels test,A-Lex test and vocabulary levels test.Taking 105 senior high school students of grade two as the research subjects,this thesis intends to answer the following research questions:(1)What is the students’ performance in the vocabulary knowledge of different dimensions?(2)Does vocabulary knowledge of different dimensions exert effects on listening comprehension? If so,to what extent?(3)To what extent does vocabulary knowledge of different dimensions predict listening comprehension performance?Based on the analysis carried out by SPSS 22.0,this thesis draws the following conclusions:(1)Learners perform best in receptive/aural vocabulary knowledge,followed by productive/written vocabulary knowledge.Besides,for different word levels of vocabulary knowledge,learners perform best at the 1000-word level but fall far short of the 3000-word level.(2)According to Pearson’s correlation,vocabulary knowledge is correlated with listening comprehension.In particular,productive/aural vocabulary knowledge can strongly influence listening comprehension.(3)The regression analysis shows that combined vocabulary knowledge can predict the variance of 50.4% in listening comprehension score,among which productive/aural knowledge can predict 39.4% variance.Research findings suggest that vocabulary knowledge of different dimensions is of great significance for senior high school students’ listening comprehension.The productive/aural vocabulary knowledge exerts a unique impact on listening.Therefore,the thesis proposes that explicit vocabulary learning activities can be designed to improve students’ attention to productive/aural vocabulary.Other activities such as phonetic training,sentence dictation,paused transcription,are recommended to help students to improve their capabilities of recognizing aural vocabulary.