English reading has become a mandatory topic for college students in English exams. The purpose of the study was to find out the relationship between vocabulary and English reading performance to find ways of improving English reading performance. The research adopted qualitative methods. One hundred respondents were taken for three weeks, which the participants included students of different majors from four years. The study adopted a questionnaire survey combined with interviews. There were 25 interviewers in the research. It was found out that there was a relationship between vocabulary and English reading performance. According to the survey and interview data, an amount of students believed that having a larger vocabulary would help them achieve better scores in English reading. Thus, the findings of the study can be summarized as a strong association between English reading performance and vocabulary size. Also, it was positive.
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