Research Specifications

Vocabulary is one of the most essential components in learning a foreign language. According to Schmitt(2010) “ one thing that all of the partners involved in the learning process (students, teachers, materials writers, and researchers) can agree upon is that learning vocabulary is an essential part of mastering a second language” (p.4). An adequate knowledge of words is a prerequisite for effective language use (Read, 2000, p.83). There are two dimensions of vocabulary knowledge. One is breadth, and the other is depth. Breadth of vocabulary knowledge is considered as the number of words that a learner knows (Nation 2001) while depth has been defined as how well a word is known or as the quality of the word knowledge (Read, 2000). The purpose of this study is to investigate the correlation between vocabulary breadth and depth on the one hand and L2 descriptive and narrative writing performance, on the other. The particular novelty of the current research is to see whether the hypothesized correlation between the two aspects of vocabulary knowledge and writing performance is identical for the two rhetorical modes of narrative and descriptive writing.