The Contribution of Vocabulary Knowledge to Reading Proficiency: The Case of College Russian

Literacy development in a second language (L2) is a key goal of college foreign language study; language programs aspire to graduate students with strong L2 reading ability. Research has shown a strong correlation between L2 vocabulary knowledge and L2 reading proficiency; however, much of this research has focused on English as a second language. Research among other language learning populations is needed to offer empirically grounded suggestions on how best to achieve high levels of L2 literacy. This article presents data on the reading proficiency and vocabulary knowledge of 48 native American-English-speaking college-level learners of Russian in order to determine whether there are identifiable lexical thresholds associated with moving from one level of reading proficiency to the next. Participants completed the ACTFL Reading Proficiency Test rated according to the ACTFL Proficiency Guidelines 2012Reading and the Russian Vocabulary Levels Test, which measured knowledge of the 5,000 most frequent words in Russian. Results showed that there are statistically significant lexical minimums associated with different levels of reading proficiency. These findings suggest the utility of similarly designed studies for other languages and are discussed in terms of implications for the role of developing vocabulary knowledge in an undergraduate curriculum.