Predicting Vocabulary Comprehension: A Case Study

The role of vocabulary comprehension in the reading process may be easily overlooked in fifth/sixth semester college Spanish courses taught in the USA. The teaching materials available for these courses may be deceiving in that the types of readings and the absence of systematic pedagogical treatment of the vocabulary may create the impression that students master more vocabulary than they actually do. Therefore, instructors' ability to predict what vocabulary will cause a comprehension breakdown becomes valuable. This case study presents data from a class that was either a fifth/sixth semester Spanish class taught at a university in the USA. The data show that the instructor was 37% accurate in predicting what words would have to be looked up by the students when they were given the task of reading a passage