The Relationship between Vocabulary Knowledge and Reading Comprehension in Second Language Acquisition

The relationship between vocabulary knowledge and reading comprehension is one of the most important topics in the field of second language acquisition. This paper mainly reviews their relationship from three perspectives: first, the components of vocabulary knowledge; second, the nature of reading comprehension and the effect of individual differences in L2 reading comprehension; third, the relationship between L2 reading comprehension and several important variables in vocabulary knowledge (e.g. vocabulary breadth, depth and coverage, etc). Finally, it explores the gaps in the current literature and points out the future research orientation of this topic.