General and Technical Vocabulary as Predictors of ESP Reading Performance among Engineering Students at ENSAM Meknes

This study examined whether general vocabulary knowledge and engineering-related technical vocabulary knowledge predict ESP reading performance among third- and fourth-year engineering students at ENSAM Meknes. The study was designed for a pooled engineering sample drawn from three majors and relied on a standardized measure of general vocabulary knowledge together with two researcher-developed instruments: a shared engineering-related technical vocabulary test and a shared engineering-ESP reading test. The design was motivated by two strands of scholarship. First, research on L2 reading has repeatedly shown that vocabulary knowledge is strongly associated with reading comprehension and that lexical coverage in a text affects how successfully readers construct meaning. Second, work on specialized discourse has argued that technical vocabulary should be identified in relation to the discourse practices of a field rather than treated as undifferentiated general lexis. The study used a cross-sectional predictive correlational design. General vocabulary knowledge was measured through the Updated Vocabulary Levels Test (UVLT), while engineering-related technical vocabulary knowledge and ESP reading performance were assessed through a 30-item vocabulary test and an 18-item reading test aligned with a shared engineering-ESP context. Both lexical predictors significantly contributed to ESP reading performance, but engineering-related technical vocabulary emerged as the stronger predictor in both hierarchical regression orderings. A commonality analysis further suggested that a substantial portion of the explained variance was shared by the two lexical predictors, while technical vocabulary retained the larger unique contribution. The overall pattern supports a layered view of ESP reading in which broad lexical knowledge provides an important base, but specialized vocabulary adds substantial explanatory value in discipline-oriented reading tasks.