View Article |
Lexical frequency effect on reading comprehension and recall
Nadia Nouri1, Badia Zerhouni2.
The present study investigates the effect of lexical difficulty, as measured by frequency, on reading
comprehension and recall. It also estimates the relationship between vocabulary size, vocabulary
depth, reading comprehension, and recall. To this end, 80 English as a foreign language (EFL)
undergraduate university students are administered three standardized instruments including two
vocabulary tests and a reading comprehension test. The latter comprises two similar passages (in
terms of length and topic) one of which is adjusted by replacing 18% of its words by their lowfrequent
synonyms, and both passages are estimated lexically to measure their difficulty. Paired
samples t-test results show that comprehension and recall are significantly low (p<.001) in the
modified passage. This finding further confirms that lexical frequency measure is an effective
estimate in determining reading material difficulty. Furthermore, for the second objective, Pearson
product-moment analysis reveals a significantly high correlation between size and comprehension,
a moderate to low correlation between depth and comprehension, and a moderate correlation
between depth and recall tasks. Consequently, the study sugguests estimating the complexity of
EFL reading academic material with lexical difficulty measure using frequency criterion to cope
with students’ reading deficiencies, and encourage explicit lexical instructions at EFL
undergraduate university levels mainly.
Affiliation:
- Mohammed V University, Morocco
- Mohammed V University, Morocco
Download this article (This article has been downloaded 218 time(s))
|
|
Indexation |
Indexed by |
MyJurnal (2021) |
H-Index
|
3 |
Immediacy Index
|
0.000 |
Rank |
0 |
|
|
|