Different aspects of vocabulary depth knowledge in L2 Chinese reading comprehension: Comparing higher- and lower-proficiency readers
Chen, T; Zhang, D
Date: 2 May 2023
Article
Journal
Foreign Language Annals
Publisher
Wiley / American Council on the Teaching of Foreign Languages
Publisher DOI
Abstract
Grammatical and vocabulary knowledge (i.e., breadth and depth) are widely acknowledged as key predictors in reading comprehension in a second language (L2). However, it remains unclear how different aspects of vocabulary depth may independently contribute to L2 reading comprehension as well as how learners’ proficiency moderates the ...
Grammatical and vocabulary knowledge (i.e., breadth and depth) are widely acknowledged as key predictors in reading comprehension in a second language (L2). However, it remains unclear how different aspects of vocabulary depth may independently contribute to L2 reading comprehension as well as how learners’ proficiency moderates the relative contributions of vocabulary knowledge. Therefore, based on the Lexical Quality Hypothesis and the Reading Systems Framework, this study investigated 238 L2 Chinese learners who were college-level students in China, using a set of reading tasks. The results showed that 1) vocabulary breadth and grammatical knowledge independently contributed to L2 reading comprehension with grammatical knowledge being a more deciding factor; 2) different aspects of vocabulary depth (i.e., polysemy and synonymy), over and above vocabulary breadth and grammatical knowledge, played an independent role; and 3) more importantly, lower-proficiency learners relied more on vocabulary breadth whereas higher-proficiency learners made more use of vocabulary depth during text-level comprehension.
School of Education
Faculty of Humanities, Arts and Social Sciences
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