There is at present no clear consensus as to the nature of the relations between oral vocabulary and specific literacy skills. The present study distinguished between vocabulary breadth and depth of vocabulary knowledge to better explain the role of oral vocabulary in various reading skills. A sample of 60 typically developing Grade 4 students was assessed on measures of receptive and expressiv...

The objectives of this study were to investigate Engineering students’ attitudes and problems in academic reading comprehension and to determine the contribution of academic reading attitude, breadth and depth of vocabulary knowledge to academic reading comprehension. The participants were 122 undergraduate students of Engineering at Iran University of Science and Technology. The Vocabulary Lev...

The overall aim of the present study is to achieve a better understanding young instructed Swedish learners’ vocabulary knowledge in L3 French, by examining various aspects depth. Previous research has shown that this learner group’s size increases systematically, and at relatively fast pace, from grade 6 through 9 (i.e., first year studies French onwards; age 12 15). However, tests only give q...

Many textbooks include semantically related words and sometimes teachers add synonyms, antonyms, etc. to the words in order to present new vocabulary items without questioning the possible effects. This study sought to investigate the effect of teaching vocabulary through synonym, semantically unrelated, and hyponym sets based on Higa’s (1963) proposed continuum. A total of 120 Iranian intermed...

To remedy the paucity of studies on the relationship between vocabulary knowledge and speaking proficiency, we examine the degree to which second language (L2) speaking proficiency can be predicted by the size, depth, and speed of L2 vocabulary among novice to intermediate Japanese learners of English. Studies 1 and 2 administered vocabulary tests and a speaking test to 224 and 87 L2 learners, ...

How deeply a word is processed has long been considered as a crucial factor in the realm of vocabulary acquisition. In literature, two frameworks have been proposed to operationalize the depth of processing, namely the Involvement Load Hypothesis (ILH) and the Technique Feature Analysis (TFA). However, they differ in the way they have operationalized it specially in terms of their attentional c...

Vocabulary knowledge plays a very important role in reading tests and reading research has consistently found a word knowledge factor on which vocabulary tests load highly. Tests of vocabulary are highly predictive of performance on tests of reading comprehension. The present paper intends to review in detail the relationships between the breadth and depth of vocabulary knowledge and EFL readin...