The Contribution of Understanding Academic Vocabulary to Answering Comprehension Questions

This study was designed to investigate whether the vocabulary of written comprehension questions is an independent factor in determining students' reading comprehension performance. The factors controlled were reader characteristics, text characteristics, and question-text-answer relationships. Sets of matched comprehension questions differing only in type of vocabulary (academic vs. everyday) were answered by 106 fourth-, fifth-, and sixth-grade students. Subjects' scores on the ITBS meaning vocabulary subtest and an informal measure of academic vocabulary knowledge were also collected. Differences between means indicated that academic vocabulary in comprehension questions significantly decreased question-answering performance. To shed additional light on this decrease, a series of simple, multiple, and semipartial correlations between vocabulary measures and comprehension question scores were computed. These correlations consistently supported the interpretation that differences in terminology between the matched sets of questions accounted for the difference in performance on the questions. Possible directions for further research and implications for practice are discussed.

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