| Summary: | 碩士 === 國立高雄師範大學 === 英語學系 === 91 === To help students greatly increase their reading proficiency must be most English teachers’ lifelong ambition and inevitable responsibility. This is also the major purpose of the study. The subject pool in the study consisted of two classes, 88 students, who were in their ninth grade of Municipal Kaohsiung Lingya Junior High School. This designed teaching program aimed at improving the EFL learners’ lexical knowledge and promoting their reading comprehension by activating their background knowledge and helping them connect their existing knowledge with newly learned vocabulary knowledge.
The subjects in this study were assigned to an experimental group and a control group with different treatments. The students in the experimental group received vocabulary teaching, but the students in the control one received none. And then a comparative study was made for the purpose of investigating the effects of the designed vocabulary teaching on enhancing reading comprehension. It also aimed at examining whether the instructional effects varied from one learner to another, depending on his or her proficiency levels. The subjects’ positive and negative responses to this teaching program were explored as well.
The summary of major findings of the study are described as follows:
1. The vocabulary instruction statistically significantly helped students retain word meanings and thus more effectively comprehend the texts.
2. The designed vocabulary instruction had different effects on students at different language proficiency levels, and the mid-level group benefited the most from it.
3. Most students gave a positive attitude toward the vocabulary instruction.
4. After receiving the vocabulary instruction, most of the students felt that the articles became a little easier to read.
Based on these findings, the researcher proposes some pedagogical implications for facilitating EFL reading instruction and lists some suggestions for further study of reading comprehension.
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