scholarly journals Assessing the relationship between Vocabulary Level Test (VLT) and reading comprehension

2017 ◽  
Vol 4 (2) ◽  
pp. 157
Author(s):  
Alpino Susanto
Keyword(s):  
Reading Comprehension ◽  
Undergraduate Students ◽  
Vocabulary Knowledge ◽  
Teaching Process ◽  
English Teaching ◽  
Word Level ◽  
Reading Activities ◽  
The Relationship

It has been considered crucial about how vocabulary knowledge in relation with reading comprehension. This research was conducted to explore the link of Indonesian students Vocabulary Level Test (VLT) performance and their reading textbook on reading subject. Through this pilot research, it can describe the implications profile in English teaching process especially in reading. Furthermore it can give more information in how to measure the reading textbook reference for reading subject or other similar subject that involve reading activities. There were 30 undergraduate students in Universitas Putera Batam that participated in the VLT. Their English textbook (Mosaic 1) was profiled to measure the lexical vocabulary level. The results indicated that only 1% of the participants had mastered the 2000-word level which means the vocabulary textbook-level is still far from students vocabulary knowledge. From the level of comparison theoretically they would have difficulties to comprehend the reading textbook, and some additional activities would be recommended, before, during and after the reading subject. 

Role of Vocabulary Levels Test (VLT) in Chinese Undergraduate Students’ Comprehension of Textbooks

2016 ◽  
Vol 7 (2) ◽  
pp. 364 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jiangfeng Liu
Keyword(s):  
Reading Comprehension ◽  
Undergraduate Students ◽  
Vocabulary Knowledge ◽  
Language Teacher ◽  
English Teaching ◽  
Word Level ◽  
University Of Technology ◽  
Chinese Learners ◽  
Mastery Level

Vocabulary knowledge has always been considered crucial in reading comprehension. This paper aims to link Chinese learners’ performance on Vocabulary Levels Test (VLT) to the profiling of their textbook so as to draw pedagogical implications on English teaching. The participants were 108 freshmen in Jiangsu University of Technology, China. All of them took part in the VLT, and their English textbook was profiled to see the lexical level of the vocabulary. Results showed that 81.48% of the participants had mastered the 2,000-word level, and the vocabulary of the textbook was within the vocabulary knowledge of the participants. However, results also indicated that no participants had reached the mastery level of the K-3, K-5 and AWL words. Based on the findings of the research, it was suggested that the language teacher could make use of the textbook to consolidate the participants’ K-1 to K-2 words and at the same time give them more exposure to K-3 to K5 words as well as academic words by exposing them to some extra materials.

FOSTERING AUTONOMOUS LEARNERS OF VOCABULARY ACQUISITION USING CONTENT-BASED ICT METHODS

2018 ◽  
Vol 6 (1) ◽  
pp. 36-43 ◽  
Author(s):  
Mariko Matsubara ◽  
Haruyo Yoshida
Keyword(s):  
Reading Comprehension ◽  
Vocabulary Acquisition ◽  
Vocabulary Learning ◽  
Vocabulary Knowledge ◽  
First Year ◽  
New Words ◽  
Effective Pedagogy ◽  
Vocabulary Building ◽  
Effective Use ◽  
Reading Activities

Purpose: This paper investigated that (1) the effective use of content-based ICT methods of vocabulary acquisition through reading activities, and (2) the encouragement of learner's vocabulary building up autonomous learning. A considerable number of studies have been conducted on vocabulary acquisition in the EFL field in Japan,and researchers advocate vocabulary knowledge is the most important factor contributing to reading comprehension, yet, a firm effective pedagogy has not been established. In fact, university students encounter difficulties in reading comprehension because of their deficiencies in vocabulary knowledge during English reading class. Methodology: The free applications, Quizlet and Kahoot!, were adopted to incorporate language-focused learning while adding some gamification aspects to aid in vocabulary acquisition. The experiment was conducted in a Japanese undergraduate first-year reading class over an 11-week period. Quizlet was used for vocabulary learning prior to the reading class. Students were given multiple-choice vocabulary Cloze tests of new words from the textbook using Kahoot!, a free game-based educational platform. Main Findings: The results of this study indicated that content-based vocabulary instruction using ICT is effective and improves learner’s academic performance in vocabulary acquisition. Moreover, questionnaires were thoroughly reviewed and uncovered that students felt they developed more autonomy and this enhanced their motivation for vocabulary learning. Implications: In view of this study, ICT methods closely related to reading contexts and a variety of applications for vocabulary acquisition and improvement of reading performance should be introduced in EFL classrooms. Originality: This study was conducted in a Japanese undergraduate first-year reading class by author researcher.

A study of Indonesian university students’ vocabulary mastery with vocabulary level test

2017 ◽  
Vol 6 (4) ◽  
pp. 187-195
Author(s):  
Rully Raslina Novianti
Keyword(s):  
Data Collection ◽  
Foreign Language ◽  
University Students ◽  
Undergraduate Students ◽  
Vocabulary Knowledge ◽  
Receptive Vocabulary ◽  
Vocabulary Size ◽  
Word Level ◽  
Significant Difference ◽  
English Instruction

In investigating learners’ vocabulary mastery, some researchers focused their studies on either receptive or productive vocabulary mastery. This study examines university students’ vocabulary knowledge in Indonesia by using the Vocabulary Level Test (VLT). It also compares the receptive vocabulary size of students who obtained extra hours of English instruction with those who had not. Furthermore, this study also identifies their strategies in enhancing their vocabulary mastery. The 2000-word frequency-band from the receptive version of the VLT and questionnaire are used for data collection. The results show that their receptive vocabulary scores are lower than 2000 words and no significant difference was found between the students who had extra hours of English instruction and those who had not. Then it can be stated that even after they had gained extra hours of English instruction, their average vocabulary knowledge was still lower than the 1000 estimated word level in the VLT. Keywords: vocabulary mastery, Vocabulary Level Test (VLT), English as a Foreign Language (EFL), undergraduate students.  

scholarly journals Co-Attention Hierarchical Network: Generating Coherent Long Distractors for Reading Comprehension

2020 ◽  
Vol 34 (05) ◽  
pp. 9725-9732
Author(s):  
Xiaorui Zhou ◽  
Senlin Luo ◽  
Yunfang Wu
Keyword(s):  
Reading Comprehension ◽  
Semantic Similarity ◽  
State Of The Art ◽  
Deep Understanding ◽  
Hierarchical Architecture ◽  
Hierarchical Network ◽  
Word Level ◽  
Human Evaluation ◽  
Sentence Level ◽  
The Relationship

In reading comprehension, generating sentence-level distractors is a significant task, which requires a deep understanding of the article and question. The traditional entity-centered methods can only generate word-level or phrase-level distractors. Although recently proposed neural-based methods like sequence-to-sequence (Seq2Seq) model show great potential in generating creative text, the previous neural methods for distractor generation ignore two important aspects. First, they didn't model the interactions between the article and question, making the generated distractors tend to be too general or not relevant to question context. Second, they didn't emphasize the relationship between the distractor and article, making the generated distractors not semantically relevant to the article and thus fail to form a set of meaningful options. To solve the first problem, we propose a co-attention enhanced hierarchical architecture to better capture the interactions between the article and question, thus guide the decoder to generate more coherent distractors. To alleviate the second problem, we add an additional semantic similarity loss to push the generated distractors more relevant to the article. Experimental results show that our model outperforms several strong baselines on automatic metrics, achieving state-of-the-art performance. Further human evaluation indicates that our generated distractors are more coherent and more educative compared with those distractors generated by baselines.

scholarly journals A study of Indonesian university students’ vocabulary mastery with vocabulary level test

2016 ◽  
Vol 6 (4) ◽  
pp. 187 ◽  
Author(s):  
Rully Raslina Novianti
Keyword(s):  
Data Collection ◽  
Foreign Language ◽  
University Students ◽  
Undergraduate Students ◽  
Vocabulary Knowledge ◽  
Receptive Vocabulary ◽  
Vocabulary Size ◽  
Word Level ◽  
Significant Difference ◽  
English Instruction

In investigating learners’ vocabulary mastery, some researchers focused their studies on either receptive or productive vocabulary mastery. This study examines university students’ vocabulary knowledge in Indonesia by using the Vocabulary Level Test (VLT). It also compares the receptive vocabulary size of students who obtained extra hours of English instruction with those who had not. Furthermore, this study also identifies their strategies in enhancing their vocabulary mastery. The 2000-word frequency-band from the receptive version of the VLT and questionnaire are used for data collection. The results show that their receptive vocabulary scores are lower than 2000 words and no significant difference was found between the students who had extra hours of English instruction and those who had not. Then it can be stated that even after they had gained extra hours of English instruction, their average vocabulary knowledge was still lower than the 1000 estimated word level in the VLT.Keywords: vocabulary mastery, Vocabulary Level Test (VLT), English as a Foreign Language (EFL), undergraduate students

scholarly journals The Relationship Between EFL Students’ Word-Knowledge in a Text and Their Reading Comprehension as Demonstrated by Saudi University Students

2018 ◽  
Vol 7 (4) ◽  
pp. 236
Author(s):  
Farooq AlTameemy ◽  
Amer Daradkeh ◽  
Abdulhameed Alhamod
Keyword(s):  
Reading Comprehension ◽  
Word Meaning ◽  
Vocabulary Knowledge ◽  
Male Students ◽  
Placement Test ◽  
Word Knowledge ◽  
First Semester ◽  
Preparatory Year ◽  
The Relationship ◽  
Very High

This study reports the outcomes of research investigating the relationship between two variables; percentage of word knowledge in an academic English text and reading comprehension scores the participants got for the same text. The study was conducted at Prince Sattam Bin Abdulaziz University, Preparatory Year Deanship, during the first semester of 2017-2018. Seventy-one Saudi male students participated in the study. They came from four groups of students selected from the Preparatory Year population to represent four various levels of English (Groups one, seven, fourteen and seventeen) based on their achievement in the placement test. Data was collected using two instruments: two word—meaning association test-lists and a reading comprehension test. The results showed that there is a statistically significant correlation (r=.702) between percentage of known words and reading comprehension in general i.e., for all the participants. The effect of word knowledge on reading comprehension was very high R square =.49. However, results for the groups separately showed that correlation was positive but not statistically significant for the higher levels i.e., groups one and seven. Also, there was a low effect of word knowledge on comprehension. For the lower levels i.e., groups 14 and 17, the correlation was positive and statistically significant. Results also showed a very high effect of vocabulary knowledge on reading comprehension.Based on the results and analysis of the study, the researchers provided recommendations that will help improve reading curriculum selection and English teaching practices, and suggestions for deeper research into the topic that will include female students and other related concepts.

scholarly journals The Relationship between Vocabulary Size and Reading Comprehension of ESL Learners

2016 ◽  
Vol 9 (2) ◽  
pp. 116 ◽  
Author(s):  
Engku Haliza Engku Ibrahim ◽  
Isarji Sarudin ◽  
Ainon Jariah Muhamad
Keyword(s):  
Reading Comprehension ◽  
English Language ◽  
Esl Students ◽  
Intensive English ◽  
Vocabulary Size ◽  
Word Level ◽  
Comprehension Skills ◽  
Admission Requirements ◽  
Esl Learners ◽  
The Relationship

<p>There are many factors that contribute to one’s ability to read effectively. Vocabulary size is one important factor that enhances reading comprehension. The purpose of the study is to examine the relationship between students’ reading comprehension skills and their vocabulary size. A total of 129 pre-university students undergoing an intensive English language programme at a public university in Malaysia participated in this study. A correlational analysis was employed to ascertain the relationship between scores in the reading comprehension component of the institutionalised English Proficiency Test (EPT) and the Vocabulary Levels Tests (Nation, 1990). Based on Pearson product moment correlation coefficient, there was a moderate correlation (r=0.641) between scores in the EPT reading comprehension and Vocabulary Levels Tests. The relationship was statistically significant at p&lt;0.01 level. The findings also indicate that all students (100%) were able to fulfil the minimum admission requirements for the reading skill (Band 5.5) in the EPT even though only half of the students (54.3%) reached the mastery level at the 5,000 word level. The findings provide useful insights into the prediction of ESL students’ performance in reading and the teaching of vocabulary in the ESL context.</p>

scholarly journals Lexical Competence and Reading Comprehension: A Pilot Study with Heritage Language Learners of Spanish

2016 ◽  
pp. 56-74
Author(s):  
Edna Velásquez
Keyword(s):  
Second Language ◽  
Reading Comprehension ◽  
Language Learners ◽  
Heritage Language ◽  
Vocabulary Knowledge ◽  
Heritage Language Learners ◽  
Logarithmic Function ◽  
Newspaper Article ◽  
Lexical Competence ◽  
The Relationship

The basic questions that guide this study are: (a) what percentage of vocabulary from a passage would a Spanish learner need to know to demonstrate ‘adequate’ (a score of 70 out of 100) comprehension of it? And, (b) what type of curve would best describe the relationship between vocabulary knowledge and reading comprehension? Fifty-three students enrolled in two courses of Spanish as a Heritage Language (SHL) at a metropolitan university read a newspaper article, underlined the unknown vocabulary and then answered a reading comprehension test. Our findings suggest, as in previous studies for English as a Second Language (ESL), that a 98% of vocabulary coverage is needed to show adequate comprehension of an authentic passage. The curve that best describes this relationship was not linear as they concluded but was similar to a logarithmic function, which appears to suggest a relationship that obeys to a law of diminishing returns for Spanish as a Second Language (SSL) reading.

scholarly journals Addressing english reading comprehension difficulties by Somali origin pupils in England primary schools: Using parents as resources

2021 ◽  
Vol 3 (1) ◽  
pp. 56-64
Author(s):  
Shamsudin Abikar
Keyword(s):  
Reading Comprehension ◽  
Primary Schools ◽  
Vocabulary Knowledge ◽  
Text Input ◽  
English Reading ◽  
Comprehension Skills ◽  
Cultural Experiences ◽  
Teacher Students ◽  
English Reading Comprehension ◽  
Reading Activities

The question of whether classroom reading activities in primary schools in England can be solely relied on to be sufficient for English as additional language (EAL) pupils to comprehend English text was the focus of the paper. Two case studies where Somali origin EAL pupils involved in learning English reading comprehension were utilized as a springboard to develop my argument that parents are an intrinsic part of developing pupils’ English comprehension as they may constitute financially less expensive and rich resources in terms of cultural experiences. Furthermore, England’s education policy regarding EAL pupils, reading for comprehension, and factors that influence it: vocabulary knowledge, teacher -students ratio in England school and parental involvement in schools were explored to provide an answer for the question of whether only reading for comprehension activities in the classroom is enough to promote the understanding of EAL Somali origin. It was argued that only those activities are not sufficient, and there is a need for the use of parents as resources to enrich the text input, which potentially increases the comprehension skills of Somali origin EAL pupils.

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