Investigating the Contribution of Vocabulary Knowledge and Reading Attitude to Academic Reading Comprehension of Iranian Undergraduate Students of Engineering

Despite extensive studies on the academic reading, it seems that there is no study investigating the predictors of academic reading comprehension. Thus, the purpose of this study was to determine the contribution of academic vocabulary knowledge and reading attitude to the academic reading comprehension of Iranian undergraduate students of Engineering. The participants of this study were 150 undergraduate students at the Iran University of Science and Technology. Isakson survey of academic reading attitudes (ISARA) developed by Isakson, Isakson, Plummer, and Chapman (2016), the academic vocabulary test by Schmitt, Schmitt, Clapham (2001) and a sample of IELTS academic reading test were the instruments in this study. The results of regression analysis revealed that academic vocabulary knowledge and academic reading attitude both contributed to the model explaining 42 per cent of the variance in the academic reading comprehension. The results also showed that the contribution of academic vocabulary knowledge to academic reading comprehension is 65% (beta= .652, p = .000), and the contribution of academic reading attitude is 5% (beta= -.056, p = .380), indicating that in this study academic vocabulary knowledge was the significant contributor to the academic reading comprehension. This study recommended EGAP instructors to make students aware of the importance of academic vocabulary and students’ attitude toward academic reading tasks.