THE EFFECTS OF VOCABULARY DEVELOPMENT ON TEXT COMPREHENSION

Abstract

The study reported in this paper adopts three strategies-knowledge and use of context clues, doing structural analysis and making associations to help ESL learners improve their vocabulary knowledge and hence their text comprehension. Forty-six secondary school ESL students participated in the study. The treatment took the form of explicit strategy instruction to acquire word meaning of selected vocabulary items from reading texts. A comarison of mean scores enabled the researchers to determine the effectivness of vocabulary development strategies in the ESL reading classroom.