The Role of Teaching Vocabulary in Improving Reading Comprehension .

Abstract

This study aims at investigating the role of teaching vocabulary in improving reading comprehension. This study is important for EFL learners, especially for first year English students of Mohamed kheider university , in order to improve their vocabulary in order to help them to understand what they read and to decrease their difficulties to become efficient readers.Therefore, we hypothesize that if our EFL learners are taught vocabulary appropriately by using effective teaching techniques, their reading comprehension will improve . EFL students of first year face some major problems in reading comprehension because of their poor stock of vocabulary .They are unable to read and understand texts, books and articles especially when they encounter difficult lexical items. To reach such an aim, we administered a questionnaire to thirty eight participants at Mohamed Kheider University of Biskra .The results revealed that reading comprehension may be improved as a result of effective vocabulary teaching. We divided our dissertation into three main chapters: Chapter one covers pre-teaching vocabulary ,teaching vocabulary ,its definitions, its description ,its steps, its strategies ,its difficulties and its importance in reading comprehension, also this chaptercovers the relationship between vocabulary strategies and reading. Chapter two covers the different views about reading comprehension and include its importance, its nature ,its components and ,its techniques . The last part of this dissertation is devoted to the field work which consists in the administration of two questionnaires for both teachers and students ,hence this chapter is devoted to describe and analyze the result of both questionnaires. Finally the results from both questionnaires were analyzed in order to confirm our main hypothesis.