Examining the Relationship between Receptive Vocabulary Size and Written Skills of Primary School Learners

Resumen

Receptive vocabulary size is an important component of lexical competence and has been observed to be instrumental for both reading and writing. The central purpose of this paper is two-fold: first, to assess the receptive vocabulary of 274 primary school Spanish learners of EFL after a total of 629 hours of instruction; second, to determine the extent to which measures of receptive vocabulary size are related to the quality of written compositions and reading comprehension skills. The study was carried out by administering two vocabulary size tests (1kWT and 2k VLT), a timed composition and a Reading Comprehension Test. The findings from this study prove that the receptive vocabulary size of Spanish primary school EFL learners is satisfactory. The correlation between receptive vocabulary size and essay quality is not very high, yet it is significant. Finally, results reflect the importance of receptive vocabulary size in reading comprehension.