The role of vocabulary in reading comprehension

Zhang, L. J., & Anual, S. B. (2008). The role of vocabulary in reading comprehension: The case of secondary school students learning English in Singapore. RELC Journal, 39(1), 51-76.

Background

This study was motivated by a previous surveyconducted with a group of secondary year four students. The survey resultsindicated that students struggled with reading comprehension due to their inability to handle certain vocabulary encountered in reading passages. Similarly, teachers also cited students’ vocabulary knowledge as the main source of poor reading comprehension.

Aims

The study sought to investigate learners’ vocabulary knowledge and its relationship to reading comprehension. The authors also wanted to find out how vocabulary difficulty in an expository text could affect students’ reading comprehension performance.

Sample

The study involved 37 Secondary 4 students from a neighbourhood school in Singapore. These students demonstrated average to below-average English language proficiency.

Method

Students were first administered a vocabulary test so as to gather data about the extent of their vocabulary knowledge.  A week later, these students completed a reading comprehension test which consisted of short answer questions (i.e., literal and inferential questions) and a summary question.

Findings

Results revealed high mean scores for the vocabulary test but low mean scores for the overall reading comprehension test. The high mean scores of the vocabulary test observed at the 2,000 word and 3,000 word levels suggested that the students had sufficientknowledge of high frequency words. However, results for the 5,000 word level suggested these students did not possess much knowledge of low frequency words.

A significant correlation was found between knowledge of high frequency words and students’ performance scores on the short-answer questions. However, the correlation between students’ knowledge of low frequency words and their scores on the short-answer questions was not statistically significant. No significant correlation was found between vocabulary knowledge (i.e., knowledge of both high and low frequency words) and the students’ performance scores on the summary task.

The finding that there was no significant correlation between the vocabulary test scores and the reading comprehension scores contradicted results from previous studies. The authors attributed the conflicting results to the different ways in which vocabulary knowledge and reading comprehension were measured.

Implications

The authors recommended improving students’ reading comprehension by getting students to read and answer questions with texts containing low frequency words, and by equipping them with strategies such as inferring word meanings based on contextual clues. Students should also be encouraged to engage in extensive reading outside the classroom and to read articles selected by teachers that contain useful low-frequency words.

Original article retrieved from Sage Journals.