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Reading and vocabulary are considered as two important factors in learning a
foreign language. Besides, a good mastery of any foreign language is based on learning its
vocabulary. This indicates the important role vocabulary knowledge plays in learning a
foreign language. On that light, many studies that seek to find out the relationship that
exists between vocabulary knowledge and reading comprehension have shown that
vocabulary knowledge is one of the most important factors which enable the students to
better comprehend any genre of text they read since comprehension is the very first reason
behind reading. Moreover, the misunderstanding of a given part in a text may hamper the
reading comprehension process of the whole text. Therefore, it is preferable for the reader
to understand the meaning of each part existing in the text in order to understand the whole
text. Thus, the richer and the deeper students’ vocabulary repertoires, the better they can
comprehend and decode the written material. In this dissertation I aim at shedding light on
the students’ reading comprehension, in addition to unveiling the teachers’ and students’
attitudes towards the relationship between vocabulary knowledge and reading
comprehension, and the impact one has on the other. For the implementation of this study
two questionnaires were addressed to both teachers and students in the Department of
Foreign Languages at the University of Constantine1. The students’ questionnaire was
distributed to third year EFL students in the Department of English for the academic year
2013-2014 and aims at revealing their views about the impact of vocabulary knowledge on
reading comprehension. The teachers’ questionnaire was provided to Written Expression
teachers who are supposed to answer questions about their students’ need for vocabulary
knowledge and reading comprehension. The obtained results from this study asserted the
hypothesis that vocabulary knowledge is the key and one of the most important factors for