Comparing Effects of Two Types of Vocabulary Knowledge on Six Question Types in Reading Tests Among Japanese EFL Learners

Abstract

Graduate Sthool, Uhii ersity of7lrukuba Abstcac't, 'lhe relationship between reading comprehension and vocabulary knowledge has been exarniiied in many studies, However, few studies se far have distinguished the vocal)utary knewledge in isolation and in c.ontext. Addressing this point, this study considered two types of vocal)ulary tests: Mochizuki (1998) Vbcal)ulary Size [[bst (VST) and TOEFL vocabulary items, and tried to clarify the relationship further. Adding to this, we classified question types in the reading test and exarnined eagh relationship with two types ofvocabulary knoyvFledge in order to differeniiate reading items by the level of reading comprehension, The results of Experiment I suggested that regardless of the presence or absence of context, there was no significant diffbrence between the correlation coethcients of the two vocabulary tests and TOEFL Reading scores, In addition, no correlation coeracients were significantly different in any question type, remaining the issue about whether the vocabulary tests in context and without context really differ or not. For the sake of investigating this point further, the word inference test was newly introduoed in Experiment II to exarnine what

Can Japanese learners of English comprehend inflectional and derivational forms in listening? Testing the validity of the word family counting unit

“…Finally, the present study assessed knowledge of words as they appeared in decontextualized prompts. As previously discussed, increasing contextualization in written receptive vocabulary assessment has not increased item facility (Henning, 1991;Ushiro et al, 2009). Although it is possible that a more supportive context would have facilitated comprehension in listening, that sort of methodology would also need to account for the increased difficulty associated with the online nature of L2 listening.…”

“…Research comparing five levels of contextualization, those ranging from the presentation of only the target word to words embedded in paragraph‐length discourse, has found no significant difference in item difficulty in written receptive vocabulary testing (Henning, 1991). Other research indicates that mostly isolated word knowledge is tested even when extensive context is provided (Ushiro et al., 2009).…”