The Relationship among Lexical Access Skills, Vocabulary Knowledge, and Reading Comprehension by Japanese EFL High School Students

Abstract

This research explored the relationship among lexical access skills, vocabulary knowledge and reading comprehension by Japanese high school students learning English as a foreign language (EFL). In previous studies, lexical access skills and vocabulary knowledge were treated in a different paradigm, but the present study attempts to incorporate both lexical access skills and lexical knowledge into a single theoretical framework, providing insight into the interrelationships among lexical skills, vocabulary knowledge, and EFL reading comprehension. This research was designed to answer the following hypotheses: Hypothesis (1): in EFL reading by Japanese high school students, scores on the orthographic test should be higher than those on the phonological test; Hypothesis (2): in EFL reading by Japanese high school students, scores on the depth of vocabulary knowledge test and the reading comprehension test should correlate more highly than those on the vocabulary size tests and the reading comprehension test. The results of this research support the importance of improving breadth and depth of vocabulary knowledge in EFL reading.