چکیده:
The current study is an attempt to investigate the particular role learners' vocabulary knowledge plays in their reading comprehension performance. Itintends to determine whether breadth and depth of vocabulary knowledge are related to EFL learners' reading comprehension, and to investigate which one of these variables, that is, depth or breadth of vocabulary knowledge, makes a more important contribution to L2 reading comprehension. It also attempts to investigate whether there is a relationship between these two vocabularyknowledge dimensions, that is, depth and breadth. Finally, the study tries tofind out whether gender has any effect on learners' reading comprehension and vocabulary knowledge. The participants of the study were sixty (30 male and 30 female) EFL learners who were chosen from among five language teaching institutes in Shiraz based on available sampling. To collect the relevant data, two tests measuring breadth and depth of vocabulary knowledge were administered to all participants. They also received a reading comprehension test in which they were asked to read the passages and answer some multiple choice questions. The results obtained from the analysis of the data indicated that while both depth and breadth of vocabulary knowledge play an important role in EFL learners' reading comprehension performance, depth of vocabulary knowledge makes a more important contribution. The results further revealed that depth and breadth of vocabulary knowledge are positively correlated, that is, those learners who had large vocabulary size had a deeper knowledge of the words, too. It was also found that gender had no significant impact on learners' reading comprehension performance and vocabulary knowledge.
خلاصه ماشینی:
"Qian's (2002) study was conducted in the context of Test of English as a Foreign Language (TOEFL) research to examine the roles of breadth and depth of vocabulary knowledge in reading comprehension and also to empirically evaluate a test which measures three elements of the depth of vocabulary knowledge, namely, synonymy, polysemy, and collocation.
With regard to the relationship between depth of vocabulary knowledge and reading comprehension, the correlations among DVK, VS, and RC were especially high, indicating that, for this given sample and among the three tests under discussion, the scores on the DVK, representing the meaning and collocation components of depth of vocabulary knowledge, were highly and positively intercorrelated with the learners' general academic reading comprehension levels.
The results of the present study corroborate Qian's (2002) findings which revealed that depth of vocabulary knowledge contributes significantly to test-takers' performance in the assessment of reading comprehension and predicts learners' reading comprehension performance better than vocabulary breadth does.
5. Conclusions The findings of the present study can be summarized as follows: With respect to the relationship between vocabulary size and reading comprehension, a high and positive correlation was obtained which shows that the more words the learners know; the more easily they comprehend the texts.
As for the effect of gender on the learners' reading comprehension performance and vocabulary knowledge tests, the results revealed no significant difference between males and females."