Abstract
Vocabulary’s relationship to reading proficiency is frequently cited as a justification for the assessment of L2 written receptive vocabulary knowledge. However, to date, there has been relatively little research regarding which modalities of vocabulary knowledge have the strongest correlations to reading proficiency, and observed differences have often been statistically non-significant. The present research employs a bootstrapping approach to reach a clearer understanding of relationships between various modalities of vocabulary knowledge to reading proficiency. Test-takers ( N = 103) answered 1000 vocabulary test items spanning the third 1000 most frequent English words in the New General Service List corpus (Browne, Culligan, & Phillips, 2013). Items were answered under four modalities: Yes/No checklists, form recall, meaning recall, and meaning recognition. These pools of test items were then sampled with replacement to create 1000 simulated tests ranging in length from five to 200 items and the results were correlated to the Test of English for International Communication (TOEIC®) Reading scores. For all examined test lengths, meaning-recall vocabulary tests had the highest average correlations to reading proficiency, followed by form-recall vocabulary tests. The results indicated that tests of vocabulary recall are stronger predictors of reading proficiency than tests of vocabulary recognition, despite the theoretically closer relationship of vocabulary recognition to reading.
Talk to us
Join us for a 30 min session where you can share your feedback and ask us any queries you have
Disclaimer: All third-party content on this website/platform is and will remain the property of their respective owners and is provided on "as is" basis without any warranties, express or implied. Use of third-party content does not indicate any affiliation, sponsorship with or endorsement by them. Any references to third-party content is to identify the corresponding services and shall be considered fair use under The CopyrightLaw.