Vocabulary: Improving Reading Comprehension

This review of literature will describe prior researches on vocabulary, vocabulary instruction, reading comprehension, and student power of memorizing words.

Vocabulary

Nash and Snowling define vocabulary as “the knowledge of words and their meanings (Nash and Snowling 2006, p. 336)”. While Sheehan (2002) states vocabulary as “the ability to understand and use words to acquire and convey meaning (Sheehan 2002, p. 1)”. Vocabulary is an important element of reading comprehension instruction. Clearly, vocabulary and comprehension skills are closely connected together. Each skill is crucial to reading achievement, and each of them relies on another. Many researchers have documented this intricate relationship. “Vocabulary development is both an

Vocabulary cannot only provide achievements in language classes, but also to other areas of study as well. Researcher’s readings emphasize the importance for teachers to utilize effective vocabulary instruction methods to improve comprehension as early as possible for students. Jenkins, Matlock, and Slocum stress on how students can negatively affected by poor reading comprehension “With each year of schooling, texts take on a larger role in instruction, and factors that may inhibit comprehension of these texts, such as a lack of vocabulary knowledge, can be expected to have increasingly detrimental effects on achievement. (Jenkins, Matlock, and Slocum, 1989, p. 217)”. Recognizing and understanding more words will increase the likelihood that students will comprehend what they are reading and therefore perform better in school. Although, teachers who include vocabulary instruction in their lessons can drive a benefit for their students, instructional methods of effective vocabulary instruction remain difficult to describe. Bromley states, “Many teachers know they need to do a better job teaching vocabulary to students who find reading difficult (Bromley, 2007, p. 528). However, selecting the most appropriate method of vocabulary instruction is a difficult task. Lubliner and Smetana describe this difficulty in their work,

As Ur sharply stated, unlike grammar, “lexical items . . . are an open set, constantly being added to (and lost, as archaic words gradually go out of use) (Ur, 2012, p. 3)”. Perhaps in this situation, most evident technological related vocabularies are growing, but everyone knows that these items are important. Such realities are related to their lives and work. Increasing English vocabulary is exciting, but it means that teachers and students need equally to be in the manner of learning vocabulary. As the titles of pedagogically oriented papers have changed over the years remarkably, we can hardly get the idea of what is the best method by a measuring them. While the time was elapsed the focus was on grammatical description, and drilling methods, modern methods reflect real communication in the classroom, help students understand spoken and written language, and participate in conversations better than prior methods. The primary goal of modern methodology is the decrease students’ anxiety. David Wilkins gave a summary of the importance of vocabulary for language learning: “Without grammar very little can be conveyed, without vocabulary nothing can be conveyed.” The echoing of this point of view is in the advice to students from a recent course book (Dellar H and Hocking D, Innovation, LTP): “If you spend most of your time studying grammar, your English will not improve very much. You will see most