THE EFFORTS IN LEARNING VOCABULARY BY THE FOURTH-YEAR STUDENTS OF THE ENGLISH DEPARTMENT AT MUHAMMADIYAH UNIVERSITY OF MALANG

Since the need of having adequate amount of vocabulary is increasing, learners of English are supposed to have certain ways for expanding their vocabulary. In this case, the investigation was concerned with the ways of the English Department students learned vocabulary with and without instruction, and the ways they persistently practiced the words they had gained. The research design employed in this study was descriptive-qualitative. The target population was the fourth-year English Department Students of Muhammadiyah University of Malang. They all belonged to the 2001-2002 English Department Senior. The number of population was 200 students. The writer used a simple random sampling procedure and the total number of the sample was 40. In collecting data, the writer used questionnaire as the instrument to get the data. The questionnaire consisted of thirty-three items, which were divided into 13 parts. From the findings, when reading textbooks, the students often consulted their dictionaries, either the monolingual one or the bilingual, to obtain good marks. When reading for pleasure, students rarely consulted dictionaries. Then, when reading for instructional purposes, students did not rely on their guessing strategies because they were not quite sure about the result. Short stories, films, songs, newspapers, magazines, and poems were made use of as the source of expanding students’ vocabulary besides reading text to learn. Of the 40 respondents, there were merely 11 (27.5%) students who still put the new words they have gained into practice through some activities such as, make a small conversation with their friends, make an English writing like poems, short stories, letters, essays, etc. In summary, the findings gained in the present study overall indicate that most of the students (29=72.5 %) are considered having average to low degree of efforts in learning vocabulary