A Review on the Important Role of Vocabulary Knowledge in Reading Comprehension Performance

Vocabulary learning is dominant in language acquisition, whether the language is a second or a foreign language, and crucial to the learners‟ overall language acquisition. One of the fundamental reasons for this notion is that a lot of unknown words, which learners encounter while reading could cause difficulties in processing the text. Students a nd teachers alike know that many of the reading comprehension breakdowns experienced by students involve word recognition and lexical access. Therefore, this review is an attempt to broaden our knowledge of vocabulary and its relationship with reading comp rehension performance.