THE CORRELATION BETWEEN ENGLISH DEPARTMENT STUDENTS' READING COMPREHENSION ON EXPOSITORY TEXTS AND THEIR VOCABULARY KNOWLEDGE BASED ON ACADEMIC WORD LIST

Abdurrakhman Aslam: The Correlation Between English Department Students' Reading Comprehension On Expository Texts And Their Vocabulary Knowledge Based On Academic Word List (Supervised by Abidin Pammu and Nasmilah)

University students are required to read widely, and to an enormous amount independently, on university courses and academic life. Research on foreign language learning reading has demonstrated that vocabulary size is a good predictor of reading competency (I. S. P. Nation, 2001), (D. Qian, 2002) and (Read, 2000). In this quantitative research, English Department students at Hasanuddin University were asked to take three reading tests and a test of Academic Word List. The AWL contains 570-word families that both students and teachers meet in a wide range of academic texts (Coxhead, 2000) and provides the foundation for a systematic approach to academic vocabulary development. A correlation test was established between the reading comprehension and vocabulary knowledge scores for measuring the relationship between vocabulary size and comprehension overall. Academic vocabulary (Academic Word List) has a significant positive correlation (R=.708, n=82, p=0.000) with overall reading comprehension. Results showed that reading comprehension and the Academic Word List show significant positive correlations in four batches of students' entry year.
Keywords : Reading Comprehension, Vocabulary, Academic Word List, Correlation