The Role of Breadth and Depth of Vocabulary Knowledge in Iranian EFL Learners’ Reading Comprehension

The current study attempts to investigate the particular role learners’ vocabularyknowledge plays in their reading comprehension performance. It intends todetermine whether breadth and depth of vocabulary knowledge are related to EFLlearners’ reading comprehension, and to investigate which one of these variables,breadth or depth of vocabulary knowledge, is a stronger predictor of L2 readingcomprehension. It also attempts to investigate whether there is a relationshipbetween these two vocabulary knowledge dimensions, that is, breadth and depth.The participants of the study were 99 EFL learners from Shahid Bahonar universityof Kerman based on convenient sampling. To collect the relevant data, threelanguage tests were adopted: two vocabulary tests and one reading comprehensiontest. The first vocabulary test is Vocabulary Levels Test (VLT) devised by Nation(1983, 1990) to measure L2 learners’ breadth, the second vocabulary test is WordAssociates Test (WAT) by Read (1998) to assess L2 learners’ depth, and the thirdscale is a TOEFL Test by Phillips (2001, pp. 361-363) to measure learners’ Readingcomprehension (RC). A two-tailed Pearson correlation and multiple regressionanalyses were run in order to analyze the scores obtained from three tests, VLT,WAT and RC. The results obtained from the analysis of the data indicated that therewas a significant relationship among the three variables. The relationship betweenBVK and RC was higher than DVK and RC. Moreover, BVK was a strongerpredictor of RC than DVK.

Keywords:

breadth of vocabulary , depth of vocabulary , reading comprehension