1. The Correlation between Senior High School Students’ Vocabulary Size and Reading Performance in the College Entrance Examination in Taiwan Proposed by Betty Hsu

2. Rationale
The average scores of KLSH students in the standardized college admission-examination: the Scholastic Aptitude English Test (SAET) have been on the decline in recent years. The outcome of the examinations is a big discouragement and warming toward students as well as toward the researcher-teacher. To cope with the problem, the researcher is anxious to explore the cause of students’ downward performance and tries to find out potential solutions. As Taiwan’s college entrance examinations for English are reading-oriented, English reading competence is key to students’ success in the examinations. And among all the components of reading, vocabulary is a crucial one. A lot of second language studies have demonstrated: 1) reading comprehension is related to vocabulary knowledge, more strongly than to the other components, either in one’s native language or in a foreign language, and 2) vocabulary serves as a good predictor of reading success. Therefore, the researcher plans to conduct a study to verify whether inadequacy of vocabulary contributes to students’ adverse performance in SAET and to identify students’ real competence levels and learning problems. By doing such a study, the researcher-teacher attempts to find out possible solutions to her teaching problems and to provide students with more effective instructions and suggestions on their learning in English vocabulary and reading.

3. Definitions
Vocabulary Size : the number of words for which a learner has at least some minimum knowledge of the words’ meaning while reading a text, in more receptive aspect than productive one
Threshold in reading comprehension: a level below which the reader will be handicapped by a lack of comprehension and above which the reader will be able to apply his or her reading strategies to help comprehension and achieve better results. Laufer (1989,1992,1996) claims that a threshold of 95% lexical coverage of a text is needed for minimum comprehension, expressed in 56% on a reading comprehension test.
English Reference Word List : published by the College Entrance Examination Center (CEEC) Taiwan, designed for the two levels of English tests in the college entrance examination of Taiwan, namely the Scholastic Aptitude English Test (SAET) and the Department Required English Test (DRET ). This English reference word list contains 6,480 words in American English. The words of levels 1-4 are supposed to be appropriate for SAET, and the words of levels 1-6, for DRET.

4. Purpose and Research questions
The study plans to explore the relationships between vocabulary size and reading comprehension in the standardized college admission English examination: the Scholastic Aptitude English Test (SAET) in Taiwan.
The researcher intends to explore following research questions:
 1. What is the vocabulary size level of students (the status quo of students’
lexical competence)?
2. How do different vocabulary size levels of students perform in the SAET
reading comprehension items? To what extent do different levels of
vocabulary size correlate with their scores of the SAET reading test?
3. What is the minimum vocabulary size range needed to achieve acceptable
performance in the reading test of SAET (the test-specific vocabulary
threshold)?
4. To what extent does vocabulary size contribute to predicting students’
performance on SAET reading comprehension?

5. Research Method
The research plans to use multivariate analyses to assess the relationship between vocabulary knowledge and reading comprehension, including their correlation, the threshold level and the prediction power .
Subjects: five intact classes of 3rd graders in KLSH (around 200 students)
Instruments: 3 major instruments applied in the research:
Vocabulary Test: to be based on “English Reference Word List”
published by the College Entrance Examination Center, Taiwan
Reading Comprehension Test: to be based on past SAET reading comprehension tests
3) Two questionnaires: one on “vocabulary acquisition” and the other on “reading problems and strategies”.

6. Design of the Research Procedure
vocabulary test  vocabulary acquisition questionnaire
reading test  reading questionnaire
After the above tasks, the research will further
1) examine if there is any discrepancy (gap) between students’ vocabulary size and the vocabulary amount required in the SAET
2) analyze how the discrepancy in vocabulary size influences students’ performance on SAET
3) investigate how much the vocabulary level accounts for and predicts students’ reading test scores.
4) determine what number of words (vocabulary threshold) students need to possess to benefit their reading comprehension while taking the SAET.
5) analyze key issues on successful vocabulary learning and give suggestions