Abstract
Vocabulary knowledge is often viewed as the building block of language. Therefore, the effect of the vocabulary knowledge in four skills (listening, speaking, reading, and writing) has long been investigated (Bonk, 2000; Laufer & Ravenhorst-Kalovski, 2010; Mecartty, 2000; Mehrpour & Rahimi, 2010; Dong, 2007; Prichard & Matsumoto, 2011; Stæhr, 2008, 2009; van Zeeland & Schmitt, 2013) . It is widely accepted that vocabulary knowledge is more significantly related to reading comprehension than to listening comprehension (Mecartty, 2000; Mehrpour & Rahimi, 2010; Stæhr, 2008; Wise, Sevcik, Morris, Lovett, & Wolf, 2007). However, these previous studies did not take the potential effect of L2 proficiency on listening and vocabulary knowledge into consideration. Also, the vocabulary knowledge in these studies was measured by testing the meanings of the words in a reading mode rather than the meanings of the words in a listening mode, which may lead to an overestimate of learners' vocabulary knowledge since Asian students' orthographic vocabulary knowledge could be bigger than their phonological vocabulary knowledge (Wang, 2015). Thus, the present study investigates the effect of vocabulary knowledge, including orthographic vocabulary knowledge and phonological vocabulary knowledge, on listening comprehension test performance when L2 proficiency is considered. The following research questions are proposed: (1) How does orthographic vocabulary knowledge relate to listening comprehension when L2 proficiency is taken into consideration? (2) How does phonological vocabulary knowledge relate to listening comprehension when L2 proficiency is taken into consideration? (3) Is there a gap between the participants’ orthographic vocabulary knowledge and phonological vocabulary knowledge when L2 proficiency is taken into consideration? (4) How many percents of the words in the College Entrance Exam Center Vocabulary Reference List do students need to know in order to pass the first stage of the GEPT intermediate-level test? Two hundred and three Chinese-speaking participants from a senior high school in Taiwan participated in this study. To make sure that there was a variability across L2 proficiency level, the participants were from 10th grade to 12th grade. Their orthographic vocabulary knowledge and phonological vocabulary knowledge were measured by the College Entrance Exam Center Vocabulary Levels Test (the CEEC Vocabulary Levels Test) both in a reading mode and in a listening mode (Chen, 2011; Chen & Tseng, 2012). Listening comprehension test performance was measured by a mock test of the old version of the Test of English Listening Comprehension (the TELC Mock Exam) designed by the College Entrance Exam Center in Taiwan. L2 proficiency depended on the criterion of passing or failing the first stage of the GEPT intermediate-level test which include both listening and reading sections. The results revealed that both phonological vocabulary knowledge and orthographic vocabulary knowledge were significantly related to the low-proficiency learners' listening comprehension test performance. For the low-proficiency listeners, phonological vocabulary can explain at least 34.4 percent of the variance in the TELC Mock Exam, which was more that the 12.4 percent of the variance in the TELC Mock Exam explained by orthographic vocabulary. In contrast, only the effect of phonological vocabulary knowledge on listening comprehension test performance was significant and stable for the high-proficiency learners. Phonological vocabulary knowledge can account for around 45 percent of the variance in the TELC Mock Exam. Furthermore, in order to pass the GEPT intermediate-level test (i.e., to be qualified as a high-proficiency learners in this study), listeners had to answer correctly at least 85% of the words in the first two levels of the CEEC Vocabulary Levels Test in the phonological version and at least 70% of the words in the third and fourth levels.