The effect of reading comprehension on improving students‟ vocabulary

In terms of quantity and complexity

SLA MPB1313

Prof. KhairiIzwan Abdullah

EhsanAtaei MP101459

Elmira Daneshpour MP 111059

Shivan Mawlood Hussein MP111020

Turnitin plagiarism checked %

Faculty of Education

University Technology Malaysia

May 2012

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CHAPTER I

INTRODUCTION

1.0 Introduction

According to Grabe (1991), Vocabulary knowledge as an active feature of language has an

important role in improving language skills. Therefore, improving of vocabulary knowledge

draws attention of many researchers in second and foreign language acquisition.

Recent findings suggest that reading comprehension is an appropriate method in teaching

vocabulary in a case many language teacher and language learners complain about direct

teaching of vocabulary. (Anderson and Freebody, 1981)

Vocabulary size and complexity are considered as a main issue among language learners. As

a result teachers try to find out effective methods for enhancing vocabulary in terms of quantity

and complexity. (Nation & Waring, 1997)Traditional methods of teaching vocabulary were not

successful. List of words, using pictures and word translation were the main aspects of teaching

vocabulary which are considered as a boring ways of teaching.

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1.1 Statement of problem

Learning vocabulary is considered as an important and influential factor in language

learning or acquisition. Students face with so many difficulties in learning vocabulary. There are

so many strategies in learning vocabulary and there is not any specific way to make learners sure

that they will have improvement in their vocabulary learning. Some of the classes focus on direct

teaching of vocabulary while our study is focus on indirect teaching of vocabulary through

reading. Learning vocabulary can help students‟ language competence which contains four skills

input and output.

1.2 Purpose of study

This study aims to find the relationship between reading comprehension and any

improvement in learners‟ writing in their vocabulary size and complexity. Moreover, the

researchers look for the role of summarizing as a study skill more than reading comprehension

on the learners‟ improvement in vocabulary size and complexity.

From theoretical perspective and based on Krashen (1982) input hypothesis

comprehensible input is enough for language acquisition. This study tests this idea in reading

comprehension, beside output hypothesis by swain (2007) which focuses on output and

productive skills like writing. It is expected to find a relationship between reading

comprehension and some strategies like summarizing with learners competence and performance

in writing a text based on those readings.

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1.3 Objectives of the Study

i. To investigate the relationship between comprehension reading and learning

vocabulary

ii. To find out whether a text summarizing increase vocabulary in use in terms of

complexity

iii. To find out whether a text summarizing increase vocabulary in use in terms of

quantity

1.4 Research Questions

The relation between comprehension reading and learning vocabulary

1. Is there any relationship between reading comprehension and learning vocabulary?

2. Does reading comprehension with and without text summarizing increase students

vocabulary in use in terms of complexity?

3. Does reading comprehension with and without text summarizing increase students

vocabulary in use in terms of quantity?

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CHAPTER II

LITERATURE REVIEW

2.0 Introduction

In this chapter comprehension reading, vocabulary in terms of size and complexity beside

text summarization and Styles of counting vocabulary were reviewed in order to find a basis for

data collection and analysis.

2.1 Reading Comprehension

Nation (1990) identified that after learning high frequency words, the teacher help the

students to improve strategies of reading comprehension and then learn low frequency words.

The reading comprehension strategies are included:

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1. Guessing from context

2. Using word parts and mnemonic techniques to remember words

3. Using vocabulary cards to remember foreign language

There is a strong connection between vocabulary knowledge and reading comprehension

crossways all age on entrance associates and proficiency levels of learners.(Verhoeven, 2000;

Nassaji, 2003 ; Roessingh, 2008)

Jitendra, Edwards, Sacks and Jacobson (2004) knowledge of vocabulary can increase

reading comprehension and it provides a justification of sound for improved focus on vocabulary

instruction.

Duke and Pearson (2002) said that reading a new text is a very good method for student

to imagine the text and think about new words and also encourage them to guess the meaning of

words from text, they compare new words with their previous knowledge (words), so this way

help them in comprehension.

Klinger and Vaughn (1996) stated explicit vocabulary improving reading comprehension

in first language and second language, reading comprehension strategies in both languages

should be taught.

2.2 Vocabulary Size

Carrol, Davies and Richardman (1971) indicated that it does not needed to know all the

words but if knowing can be a very successful for language users, they believed that learners

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should increase their vocabulary size. To read some texts that contain unknown vocabulary,

native speakers need to know around 15,000 to 20,000 word families.

Nation (2001) mentioned that to understand better about depth of vocabulary, it is

important to know so many things about a word to use, and knowing different degrees of words.

According to Nation vocabulary knowledge divided to productive and receptive which refers to

active and passive vocabulary. Nation (1993: 125) “the more sensible estimates indicate that

adult native speakers of English with a tertiary education have a vocabulary size around 20,000

word families. Most of this is made up of low frequency words. These words are learned through

diverse and wide-ranging contact with the language”.

A good explanation for vocabulary size is around 20,000 words as a normal size that each

person should know. English speaker (native speaker) knows 1000 words more than the others.

Students who are in elementary school will know vocabulary around 4000 to 5000 words,

otherwise the vocabulary size for university student is around 20,000 words. ( Goulden, Nation

& Read, 1990). On the other hand D'Anna, Zechmeister and Hall (1991) believed that

vocabulary size is depend on items that are incorporated and in which way a word family is

definite.

2.2.1 Vocabulary size and text coverage in the Brown corpus:

Vocabulary size Text coverage

1000

2000

3000

4000

5000

6000

15,851

72.0%

79.7%

84.0%

86.8%

88.7%

89.9%

97.8%

Table 2.1

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Table 2.1 indicates the relationship between vocabulary size and written texts. The last

line is indicated 15,000 words can cover 95 % of the running words of their corpus. On the other

side the table shows that before knowing high frequency words we know lower frequency words.

It means that knowing around 1000 words cover 70% written text and in each line we have two

unknown words. ( Francis & Kucera, 1982)

Heath (1985) stated that this vocabulary size is not sufficient to guess the meaning of

unknown words. As Nation (2001) believed that vocabulary size should cover around 95% of

written text to guess the meaning of unknown words.

Biber(1990) explained how particular language characteristics cluster in particular text

types refers to studies of corpus. So the spoken and written corpora that used should coat a series

of representative kinds of text.

2.3 Vocabulary Complexity

Academic texts contain low frequency words which are not known by many readers

because readers rarely encounter these words in their text readings. According to Waring and

Nation (2004), for acquiring public texts or academic texts readers need a massive amount of

vocabulary So as to comprehend the texts.

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Sutarsyah, Nation and Kennedy (1994) said academic texts which contain various topics

are not easily covered by readers because they contain a lot of academic words which are

familiar by a few of readers; this makes the texts difficult to be understood.

2.4 Text summarization

Jones, Hovy, Lin, Mani and Maybury (1999) clarified three specific stages of text

summarization:

1. Identify topic: define what topic is and what main purpose of text is.

2. Interpretation: clarify concepts and meaning of abstract, some part that we cannot find

in original text.

3. Generation of summary: paraphrase the text and break parts into a coherent (text

planning).

2.5 Styles of counting vocabulary

2.5.1 Tokens

Token means counting all words in a text includes repeated words and it considered as a

most simple style of counting words. Token does not focus on word patterns or derivations.

(Nation, 2001)

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2.5.2 Types

Vocabulary type is the most common style of counting vocabulary. Many researchers

follow this style for counting words in texts. Type style means counting all words excluding the

iterated words. Word patterns are dealt as a different kind of the words. (Schmitt ,2000)

2.5.3 Academic word families

Coxhead (2000) mentioned Academic word families are a kind style of calculating

words. All derivations, affixed, suffixes and heads are dealt as the same type of academic word

family. Academic word families are the most difficult method of counting words. The readers

usually get confuse in counting academic word families because they should return all the words

into the original heads so as to know whether they are belong to the same word families or not.

Coxhead and Nation (2001) stated that one of the most important elements for reading

comprehension is knowledge of passive vocabulary. Reading comprehension and academic

success have mutual relationship.

2.6 Reading comprehension and vocabulary learning

Schmitt (2000) said being able to understand a word is known as receptive knowledge

and is normally related with reading.

Nation (2001) confirmed that language learners can recall the meaning of words and add

them to their vocabulary knowledge while reading them. This knowledge can be in the form of

active or passive vocabulary. Chall (1987) found the similar idea and said proficient reader can

use reading to learn new vocabulary .teachers should use different approaches toward reading in

order to improve the size learners‟ vocabulary knowledge.

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CHAPTER III

RESEARCH METHODOLOGY

3.0 Introduction

In order to find an appropriate answer for research questions about the effect of reading

comprehension on improving students‟ vocabulary in terms of quantity and complexity pre and

post writing with special treatment was designed by researchers.

3.1 Research Design

A quantitative design has been chosen in accordance with objectives of this study.

Participants write an article and after treatment they need to write another article with the same

topic. A comparison between these two articles has shown the results of this study.

3.2 Participants of the Study

The participants in the study were 6 UTM Master Students who were joined in this study

voluntarily and by random. Participants were in mixed gender and their age ranged between 25

to 31 years old. Before the main study students were divided to low and high level in terms of

their language proficiency based on their pre-writings.

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3.1 Instrument

Web VP V.3 or vocabulary profiler (Cobb, 2010a) has chosen as an instrument of this

study. It is online software; check the texts vocabulary frequencies and types and it was adapted

from vocabulary profiling concept. (Laufer and Nations, 1995)

Figure 3.1. VP software environment

It generates a report about types of words, total number of words in the text (tokens) and

some other lexical items. West (1953) mentioned about a list of lexical frequency called general

service list (GSL), Web VP classic compare the taken words with GSL and also with another list

by Coxhead (2000) called academic word list(AWL). Moreover, the software gave a report

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about K1 which is the first 1000 words covered by the texts and also K2 which is the second

1000 words covered by the texts related to GSL.

3.1.1 Data Collection Methods

3.4.1 Pre- and post-writing

The pre- and post-writing required the subjects to write short narrative essays of Approximately

minimum 100 words within 60 minutes on one the following topics.

1. Friend in needs is a friend in deed.

2. The role of Mother or parents in your life.

3. Importance of technology in life

This pre-writings have done to evaluate students‟ vocabulary knowledge in terms of quantity

and complexity before the treatment. The post-writings have done to check the same items. The

conclusion has done based on the comparison between pre and post writing evaluation. This

evaluation has done by Web VP v3.

3.5 Data Collection Procedure

The Data collection had been taken in 2 weeks as follows:

Step 1 Pre-writing based on one topic among three selected topics ( All Participants )

Step 2 Students are divided into two groups based on the number of the words

higher than the mean of all the pre writing texts to find participants

vocabulary level ( ULTG and LLTG) upper level than mean group and lower

level than mean group)

Step 3 Groups subdivide into control and experimental groups randomly

Step 4

Treatment

Reading a

Text

Reading and summarizing a relevant text ( Experimental group)

Just Reading a text (Control group)

Step 5 Post-writing based on vocabulary and knowledge attained from treatment

Step 6 Data about frequency and complexity of the texts were collected by Web VP

software v3

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3.6 Data analysis

Descriptive analysis have done by based on the comparison in means in both groups has

shown the answers to the research questions. K1, K2 AWL, off list words tokens and some

specific items related to vocabulary frequency and complexity were analyzed by Vocab profiler

v.3. Quantitative data helped researchers to compare pre-writings and post-writings and answer

to the research questions perfectly.

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CHAPTER IV

FINDINGS AND DISCUSSION

4.0 Data analysis

The is chapter shows and compares the result of both experimental and control groups so

as to answer research questions which include the possible relationship between reading

comprehension and learning vocabulary. In addition, to answer whether reading comprehension

with summarizing improves learners‟ vocabulary knowledge in terms of size and complexity.

Furthermore, in order to show whether reading comprehension without summarizing develops

learners‟ vocabulary recognition in terms of size and complexity or not all data were collected.

4.1 Findings and Discussion

Regarding to the procedure in methodology, participants were asked to have pre-writing

and post writing. The results present the differences between experimental and control groups for

answering the research questions.

Two essays as pre-writing and post writing were written by participants. The words in

both pre-essay and post essay writings were counted based on types of the words. The results of

both writings include number, mean and total of words base on Types, words belong to 1-1000

types word families , words belong to 1001-2000 types word families, academic word families in

addition to off-list words are indicated in table 4.1. A and Table 4.1.B

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Number of words of

Types

1-1000 types

word families

1001-2000 types

word families

Academic words OFF. LIST

J 96 84 6 2 4

E 87 78 6 2 1

A 106 86 8 7 5

H 91 68 13 3 7

M 92 85 4 2 1

M 130 95 10 14 11

Total 602 496 47 30 29

Mean 100.3 82.7 7.8 5 4.8

Table 4.1 A- The result of pre-writing before Reading

Number of words of

Types

1-1000 types

word families

1001-2000 types

word families

Academic words OFF. LIST

J2 95 85 5 2 3

E2 96 81 4 6 5

A2 126 107 6 4 9

H2 101 57 17 11 16

M2 76 70 2 3 1

S2 152 109 16 17 10

Total 646 509 50 43 44

Mean 107.7 84.8 8.3 7.17 7.3

Table 4.1- B. The result of post writing after writing

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mean Number of words

of Types

1-1000 types

word families

1001-2000 types

word families

Academic words OFF. LIST

Pre- writing 100.3 82.7 7.8 5 4.8

Post writing 107.7 84.8 8.3 7.17 7.3

discrepancy +7.4 +2.1 +0.5 +2.17 +2.5

Table 4.1 C- The discrepancy of mean (In each part)

As demonstrated in Table 4.1 A,B and C the Means of all parts are positively increased

especially in the Number of words which the difference is +7.4 while the difference between

Means in 1001-2000 types word families in Pre- writing and Post writing is is +0.5 which is not

significantly increased. The results indicate that there is a positive relation between reading

comprehension and vocabulary knowledge development. The result of this study is similar to

findings of researchers such as Verhoeven (2000), Nassaji (2003), and Roessingh (2008),

Jitendra, et al (2004) who found that there is a connection between reading comprehension and

progressing learners‟ levels of vocabulary knowledge.

The pre-writing and post writing of both experimental and control groups were purposely

taken from participants are shown in the table 4.2.2 so as to identify whether comprehension

reading with an without summarizing improve learners‟ vocabulary in terms of size.

Groups Number of words of Type

in pre-writing

Number of words of Type

in post-writing

Difference

exp

erim

enta

l

J 96 95 -1

H 91 101 +10

S 130 152 +22

MEAN 105.7 116 +10.3

con

trol A 106 126 +20

E 87 96 +9

M 92 76 -9

MEAN 95 99.3 +4.3

Table 4.2 result of both experimental and control group in pre-writing and post writing

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In the light of the results in the table 4.2, the size of words in both experimental and

control groups developed. The Means in both experimental and control groups are increased

which means reading comprehension with and without summarizing improve learners‟

vocabulary size. Furthermore, the size of words in experimental group more developed

comparing to control group. The difference between Means in pre-writing and post writing in

experimental group is +10.3 while the disciplinary in Means in control group in pre-writing and

post writing is +4.3 which indicates that reading comprehension with summarizing is more

effective than reading comprehension without summarizing. Duke and Pearson (2002)

maintained that there is an association between reading and learners‟ vocabulary size which is

parallel to our findings.

For answering whether text reading perception with or without summarizing helps in

developing learners‟ vocabulary knowledge in terms of complexity, the results of pre-writing

and post writing have been concluded in the following tables.

1-1000 types word families

in pre- writing

1-1000 types word

families in post-writing Difference

J 84 85 +1

H 68 57 -11

S 95 109 +14

TOTA

L

247 251

MEAN 82.3 83.7 +1.4

A 86 107 +21

E 78 81 +3

M 85 70 -15

TOTA

L

249 258

MEAN 83 86 +3

Table 4.3 Improvement of vocabulary in the 1-1000 types word families

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1001-2000 types word

families in pre-writing

1001-2000 types word

families in post-writing Difference

J 6 5 -1

H 13 17 +5

S 10 16 +6

TOTAL 29 38

MEAN 9.7 12.7 +3

A 8 6 -2

E 6 4 +2

M 4 2 +2

TOTAL 18 12

MEAN 6 4 +2

Table 4.3 B improvement of vocabulary in the 1001-2000 types word families

Academic words in

pre-writing

Academic words in post

writing

Difference

J 2 2 0

H 3 11 +8

S 14 17 +3

TOTAL 19 30

MEAN 6.3 10 +3.7

A 7 4 +4

E 2 6 +4

M 2 3 +1

TOTAL 11 13

MEAN 3.7 4.3 +0.6

Table 4.3 C improvement of vocabulary in the Academic words

Based on the results appear in table 4.3 A,B and c reading comprehension with

summarizing is more effective in enhancing vocabulary knowledge in terms of complexity

especially in Academic words and the 1001-2000 types word families in contrast to the 1001-

2000 types word families. The Mean Academic words significantly increased which is +3.7, and

likewise the Mean in 1001-2000 types‟ word families obviously increased comparing to 1001-

2000 types word families‟ Mean which raised +1.4. On the other hand, reading comprehension

without summarizing is more beneficial to develop vocabulary knowledge in the 1001-2000

types word families. The tables shows that the Mean of reading comprehension without

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summarizing which means control group sharply raised in comparison to the Mean both of

academic words which is +0.6 and the 1001-2000 types word families which is +2 are

increased in ineffective way.

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CHAPTER V

CONCLUSIONS

5.1 Pedagogical Implication

Based on study results in chapter four, Researchers can provide some pedagogical

implications to teachers and syllabus designer to include readingcomprehension in language

classes in order to increase learners‟ vocabulary knowledge. And give extra reading

comprehension to learners who are weak in vocabulary.

The second pedagogy is instructors are advices to ask summary of the text after reading

comprehension for improving learners vocabulary in terms of quantity because base on our

findings reading comprehension has a positive effect of students vocabulary size in addition to

other benefits.

The other pedagogy is that learners who face difficulties in learning vocabulary

knowledge in terms of complexity should provide with reading comprehension without

summarizing because reading comprehension without summarizing helps learners to be fluent

and fast and encounter complex more time and learn them effectively.

5.2 Limitation

This study like other studies is not free of limitation. One of the limitations is number of

the participants because more participants make the result more reliable and accurate to the real

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sample. The other limitation is related to the learners‟ differences in vocabulary and reading

competence. Gender and age can be considered as a secondary limitation in this study which has

some effects on the study results. Time of reading is another limitation of this study. Students

with more reading comprehension can be developed in their vocabulary knowledge. The

limitation of facility of providing suitable texts has negative effect on the results.

5.3 Suggestion for further study

This study focused on the types of the word in terms of complexity and size. It is

recommended to other researchers to focus on frequency of the word in the text in improving

vocabulary knowledge. In addition, other researchers are recommended to focuses on the other

part of words such as word families and token words. This research suggested that further

researchers should include more scales and larger number of participants.

5.4 Conclusion

In conclusion, it can be said vocabulary is one of the most aspects in language learning

because it affects other language skills like writing. Based on this study results, reading

comprehension is an effective strategy for improving vocabulary in and outside of classrooms.

Summarizing after reading comprehension has an influence on learning vocabulary especially for

the purpose of size of the words.

Language classes should use reading comprehension as a supplementary strategy or task

for improving other skills in language learning because language classes mostly depend on

reading regardless whether is comprehensible or not

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