The Role of Vocabulary vs. Syntactic Knowledge in L2 Reading Comprehension

Abstract

Research in literature reports the importance of L2 vocabulary and syntactic knowledge on the learners’reading comprehension. In this regard, the current study investigated the role of vocabulary knowledgethat is disunited into depth and breadth dimensions and syntactic knowledge in the readingcomprehension scores of an advanced cohort of English as a Foreign Language (EFL) learners. Inparticular, this study examined the relationship of vocabulary knowledge (with its two dimensions) andsyntactic knowledge with reading comprehension scores of 30 Turkish EFL learners and the extent towhich these knowledge types explain the variance in reading comprehension scores. Measures ofvocabulary breadth, vocabulary depth, syntactic knowledge and reading comprehension were used. Thedata analysis procedure included the descriptive statistics, Pearson product-moment correlations andmultiple regression analysis. The results showed that the depth of vocabulary knowledge predicts the L2reading comprehension the best when the effect of vocabulary size and syntactic knowledge is controlled.These findings are discussed at the end of the study with future research suggestions and limitations.© 2019 EJAL & the Authors. Published by Eurasian Journal of Applied Linguistics (EJAL). This is an open-accessarticle distributed under the terms and conditions of the Creative Commons Attribution license (CC BY-NC-ND)(http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/).