An Investigation Of Students' And Teachers' Views About The Impact Of Vocabulary Knowledge On Reading Comprehension

Résumé: One of the prominent skills learners are in need to is the ability to comprehend written texts. Understanding the writer's text or his intended meaning is the ultimate goal behind reading. To comprehend large pieces of written texts, learners are supposed to understand smaller entities first. For this reason, many studies have shown that vocabulary knowledge can help students to read and comprehend better. The richer and the deeper is their lexical knowledge, the better they can decode and understand what they read. Importantly, it is unreasonable to underestimate the reciprocal relationship between vocabulary knowledge and reading comprehension. Our aim in this dissertation is to contribute to the existing literature on the relationship between vocabulary knowledge and reading comprehension; in particular, we aim at uncovering teachers' and students' attitudes about the impact that vocabulary knowledge on reading comprehension. Therefore, to accomplish this study, two questionnaires were devised to both students and teachers from the Department of foreign Languages at Larbi Ben M'Hidi university. The students' questionnaire was given to first-year students of english from the same department during the academic year 2012-2013 to get insights about their views concerning vocabulary knowledge and its value in reading comprehension. Teachers' questionnaire is dedicated to ten teachers to check their responses regarding their students' need to vocabulary knowledge and reading comprehension. The results obtained in this study confirmed the hypothesis that vocabulary knowledge is the basis for any reading comprehension. Ultimately, there is an infrangible connection among reading comprehension and vocabulary knowledge.

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