An Investigation of Relationships among English Vocabulary Size, Listening Comprehension, and Reading Comprehension of Taiwanese EFL Senior High School Students

• Main Authors: Ang-li Tu, 凃昂里
• Other Authors: Yu-gi Chao
• Format: Others
• Language: en_US
• Online Access: http://ndltd.ncl.edu.tw/handle/83364649558189616222

碩士 === 國立彰化師範大學 === 英語學系 === 103 === Vocabulary is considered as one of important factors for successful language learning, therefore, the purpose of the study aimed to examine the relationships among senior high school students’ English vocabulary size, listening comprehension, and reading comprehension, and tried to explore senior high school students’ current vocabulary size. Also, the study investigated the needed vocabulary size for passing GEPT intermediate first stage. There were 297 subjects selected from foursenior high schoolsin the central Taiwan. Among these four senior high schools, two classes were selected in each school; however, there were 287 valid data due to the incompletion of the tests. The instruments of the study were the Vocabulary Size Test (Nation, 2007), listening comprehension test of GEPT intermediate level, and reading comprehension test of GEPT intermediate level. The quantitative data were analyzed by the SPSS version 22 for the descriptive statistics and inferential statistic in order to find out the mean, standard deviation, maximum and minimum, frequency, and Pearson Correlation Coefficients was adopted to find out the correlation coefficients among vocabulary size, listening comprehension, and reading comprehension. The major findings of the study were as follows. First of all, the results showed that the grade 11th senior high school students’ vocabulary size was approaching4,000. Secondly, the relationships among vocabulary size, listening comprehension, and reading comprehension were significantly correlated, and the correlation coefficient between vocabulary size and listening comprehension was .66, the correlation coefficient between vocabulary size and reading comprehension was .72, the correlation coefficient between listening comprehension and reading comprehension was .88. Thirdly, in this study, the senior high school students had to achieve 3,475 of vocabulary size in order to pass the GEPT intermediate level of the reading and listening tests. According to the findings of the study, a number of pedagogical implicationswere provided; the limitation of the study was pointed out;suggestions for further studies were offered at the end.