The Role of' Vocabulary Knowledge in ESL Reading Comprehension

The importance of vocabulary knowledge, syntactic awareness, and inference generation abilities in reading comprehension has been Jong established in the first language research. By contrast, fewer studies have documented the role of these components in the reading comprehension of English language learners in the field of second language (L2) research. The proposed study thus examines the role of vocabulary knowledge. syntactic awareness, and inference skills in L2 reading comprehension in young learners. who have age-appropriate word decoding ability and the required phonological processing ability. Two of the primary aims of the study were to establish vocabulary knowledge, syntactic awareness and inference generation ability as distinguishable psychological constructs, and to examine the strength of the relations between the constructs and with respect to reading comprehension. The third aim was to find out whether vocabulary knowledge, syntactic awareness and inference generation ability explain differences between less skilled and skilled L2 readers, and whether the correlations between the constructs and reading comprehension were different for less skilled and skilled L2 readers.

Throughout the book, consciously used the terms ·skilled· and ·less skilled·comprehenders, since the term 'poor comprehenders' is used in a very specialized way to refer 10 learners ,vho haye an underlying deficit. In our study. no clinical assessments were done and therefore there was no way to establish that poor comprehension was due to an underlying deficit or due to external factors like teaching methodology, reading exposure. or socio-economic background. To be on the safer side, learners who had low reading comprehension (less than 0.4 standard deviation below age-appropriate and comprehension mean) were referred to as 'less skilled comprehenders.' The term also distinguished them from 'poor readers· a label often used in the reading research literature to refer to learners who have weak decoding skills.