词汇量与阅读理解的相关性研究 : 以新加坡中学生为例 = CORRELATION BETWEEN VOCABULARY SIZE AND READING COMPREHENSION : A CASE STUDY OF SINGAPORE SECONDARY SCHOOL STUDENTS

Abstract

The relationship between receptive and productive skills is a complex one, with one set of skills naturally supporting another. Comprehension, comprising of Multiple Choice Questions and Open Ended Questions, is a good tester of a student's receptive skills of understanding the comprehension passage and also his productive skills in attempting the questions. This paper aims to investigate the effect of productive vocabulary size on Chinese reading comprehension ability. The subjects involved in this study are 163 Secondary Three (Express) students in Singapore, of which 73 and 90 students are from Broadrick Secondary School and Tanjong Katong Secondary School respectively. Results show that the subjects do not perform as well in the open ended section of the comprehension, scoring an average of 48%, compared to the average score of 74% in the multiple choice section. The open ended section is further divided into three question types, namely Lifting, Explain Sentence and Free Response, of which respectively earning an average score of 58%, 24% and 44%. The average productive vocabulary size of the students is 4878 and the average lexical richness of the students is 3.87. Through the use of correlation and regression functions of PHStat2 statistical software, it is found that both productive vocabulary size and lexical richness are moderately correlated (r=0.51, p<0.05) with comprehension scores and a cause-and-effect relationship exists between the two variables, indicating their effect on reading comprehension ability. With regards to the findings, the writer suggests two ways to improve reading comprehension ability amongst students by increasing their vocabulary size. Firstly, to teach vocabularies within a context so as to better depict the meaning of the vocabulary. Secondly, to consolidate vocabulary knowledge through reading exposure, by setting reading levels and increasing the frequency of frequently used words in the corpus.The relationship between receptive and productive skills is a complex one, with one set of skills naturally supporting another. Comprehension, comprising of Multiple Choice Questions and Open Ended Questions, is a good tester of a student's receptive skills of understanding the comprehension passage and also his productive skills in attempting the questions. This paper aims to investigate the effect of productive vocabulary size on Chinese reading comprehension ability. The subjects involved in this study are 163 Secondary Three (Express) students in Singapore, of which 73 and 90 students are from Broadrick Secondary School and Tanjong Katong Secondary School respectively. Results show that the subjects do not perform as well in the open ended section of the comprehension, scoring an average of 48%, compared to the average score of 74% in the multiple choice section. The open ended section is further divided into three question types, namely Lifting, Explain Sentence and Free Response, of which respectively earning an average score of 58%, 24% and 44%. The average productive vocabulary size of the students is 4878 and the average lexical richness of the students is 3.87. Through the use of correlation and regression functions of PHStat2 statistical software, it is found that both productive vocabulary size and lexical richness are moderately correlated (r=0.51, p<0.05) with comprehension scores and a cause-and-effect relationship exists between the two variables, indicating their effect on reading comprehension ability. With regards to the findings, the writer suggests two ways to improve reading comprehension ability amongst students by increasing their vocabulary size. Firstly, to teach vocabularies within a context so as to better depict the meaning of the vocabulary. Secondly, to consolidate vocabulary knowledge through reading exposure, by setting reading levels and increasing the frequency of frequently used words in the corpus.