Vocabulary learning through vocabulary scrapbook

For the last 25 years, the field of English language teaching has witnessed significant responses to the incorporation of vocabulary learning in the language classroom. Vocabulary learning has been viewed as central to language learning and being of critical importance to the typical language learner. According to Coady (1997), there is a general agreement among vocabulary learning advocators that the heart of communicative competence is lexical knowledge. Such shift in emphasis in the field of ELT, followed by continuous research on vocabulary learning, have shed light on, and have provided valuable information about what to do and what to focus on. All these imply that the teachers in the language classrooms can utilise many interesting and creative techniques in vocabulary teaching and learning. A project called Vocabulary Scrapbook was introduced to the first semester students at Universiti Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia France Institute with the aim to enrich students’ vocabulary inventories via specific vocabulary learning strategies. This paper describes how the principles underlying vocabulary learning are put into practice in the project, the problems faced by the teachers and students in carrying out the project, and the effectiveness of the project in improving students’ inventories of words and phrases. A survey carried out after the project was completed revealed the students’ positive reception of the project – viewing it as a useful tool in learning and enriching their vocabulary

Using Song to Improve Students’ Vocabulary Mastery

Vocabulary mastery is one of the requirements for students to be able to communicate both in spoken and written. There are many ways to improve students’ vocabulary mastery used by the language teacher. This paper aims to examine the use of English song to motivate students in learning English. In addition, this concerns on the use of English song to improve students’ vocabulary mastery. The respondents were fifteen elementary students of community groups of orphans An-nur Surabaya. The data were taken by assessing the students’ vocabulary mastery through pre-test and post-test, and analyzed to identify students’ vocabulary mastery. The result shows that students responded positively to this activity and indicated improvement in their vocabulary mastery. Thus, the study suggests that the use of English song is an effective media to improve the students’ vocabulary mastery

Vocabulary is important for some, but not all reading skills

Although there is evidence for a close link between the development of oral vocabulary and reading comprehension, less clear is whether oral vocabulary skills relate to the development of word-level reading skills. This study investigated vocabulary and literacy in 81 children of 8-10 years. In regression analyses, vocabulary accounted for unique variance in exception word reading and reading comprehension, but not text reading accuracy, decoding and regular word reading. Consistent with these data, children with poor reading comprehension exhibited oral vocabulary weaknesses and read fewer exception words correctly. These findings demonstrate that oral vocabulary is associated with some, but not all reading skills. Results are discussed in terms of current models of reading development

THE TECHNIQUES OF TEACHING ENGLISH VOCABULARY AT SLTPN 1 KEDUNGADEM-BOJONEGORRO

There are many technique used by the teacher in teaching English vocabulary. So far, based on the English curriculum for the junior High School describes a mastery of approximately 1000 vocabulary. As we know that vocabulary is one of the fundamental factors that make it possible for a person to speak a language in a communicative way. For this purpose, teaching English vocabulary need special technique in order to help the student’s English mastery. The problem of this study are(1) What is the techniques used by the teacher in teaching English vocabulary at SLPN 1 Kedungadem-Bojonegoro? (2) What is the teacher’s reason choosing the techniques in teaching English vocabulary at SLTPN 1 Kedungadem- Bojonegoro? (3) What is the student’s perception toward the technique used by the teacher in teaching English vocabulary at SLTPN1 Kedungadem-Bojonegoro? Accordingly, the purpose of the study are: (1) To know the teaching technique used by the teacher in teaching English vocabulary at SLTPN 1 Kedungadem-Bojonegoro, (2) To know the reason’s of choosing the techniques used by the teacher in teaching English vocabulary at SLTPN 1 Kedungadem-Bojonegoro, (3) To know the student’s perception toward the techniques of teaching vocabulary used by the teacher. This study uses a descriptive qualitative design to obtain data concerning the research problem. The sample of this study consisT of one English teacher and 39 students in the first years. The data of this study are collected by applying interview, observation and questionnaires. The interview just for the first English teacher at SLTPN 1 Kedungadem- Bojonegoro, While an observation to the classroom and the questionnaire for the first student of SLTPN 1 Kedungadem-Bojonegoro. The result of this study show that the technique used by the teacher who is teaching in the classroom are dialoque, drill and games.The reason of choosing the techniques is to avoid the student get bored and bring the students’ concentration on learning vocabulary. At last, the games techniques are suitable to be applied in teaching learning process, especially on teaching English vocabulary at SLTPN 1 Kedungadem-Bojonegoro. They will help the students to learn English vocabulary and facilitate their rapid understanding of the English materials

Factors causing difficulties in learning vocabulary by the fifth year students of ngringo 02 Elementary School Karanganyar in the Academic Year of 2005/2006�

This thesis is intended to 1) analyze the process of teaching and learning vocabulary at the fifth year students of Ngringo 02 elementary school, 2) identify difficulties faced by the students in vocabulary learning, 3) identify and formulate factors causing vocabulary learning difficulties, 4) investigate strategies used by the teacher to solve difficulties in vocabulary learning. This study of which population is all of the 28 of the fifth year students, uses a descriptive qualitative method and purposive random sampling technique. In collecting the data, this study uses observation, questionnaire, interview, and document to elicit the data from the process of teaching and learning vocabulary. The technique of analyzing the data is the Interactive- Analysis Model, which is proposed by Miles and Huberman. The results of the study show that 1) the process of teaching and learning vocabulary at the fifth class is conducted appropriately. However, there are many weaknesses which come from the students who have simple strategies, limited sources and lack of readiness in their vocabulary learning. Meanwhile, another weakness comes from the English teacher who employs simple techniques and limited media in the process of vocabulary teaching, 2) there are four difficulties faced by the students in vocabulary learning, the percentages of which are 86% in translation, 93% in pronunciation, 85% in writing, and 86% in differentiating word classification. In the average, there are 87.5% students who find difficulties in vocabulary learning, 3) there are two factors causing vocabulary-learning difficulties. They are the internal factor, which comes from the students and the external one which includes the family environment and the aspects of school such as the teacher, teaching techniques, the materials, and instructional media, 4) there are many strategies used by the teacher to solve problems in vocabulary. In translation, she translated the words directly without consulting to the English dictionary. In pronunciation, she pronounced the words and followed by the students. In word classification, she refreshed their memories by asking the classification of word in teaching and learning process. In addition, she always tries to improve her knowledge to find new innovation in English teaching. Unfortunately, she didn�t pay close attention to solve the spelling problem. The reason is that they will accustom to study spelling in the following class and they will study by themselves. It is suggested that besides motivating and preparing students� readiness, hopefully, the teacher also uses various teaching techniques and various media in the process of teaching and learning vocabulary to improve their understanding in achieving better English learning

Assessing Vocabulary of Children: Investigating the Evaluation and Instruction of Basic Concepts

Vocabulary knowledge of preschool children is a key factor in predicting literacy success in elementary school (Hammer, Farkas, & Maczuga, 2010). However, few deliberate attempts to teach basic concept vocabulary have been studied (Bowers & Schwarz, 2013; Wilson, 2004). The purpose of this research is to determine if large group explicit instruction with interactive activities of specific basic concept vocabulary will increase preschool children\u27s understanding of basic concept terms when measured by a standardized basic concept assessment. This research will also assess the validity of a basic concept-curriculum based measure (BC-CBM) as an efficient tool to monitor a child\u27s understanding of basic concept vocabulary over time. There were 30 preschool children (M age=53.8 months) who participated in this experiment. Results demonstrated the standardized assessment and BC-BM raw scores improved through intervention. Further research is supported to evaluate the BC-CBM on a larger scale and control for more factors, which influence vocabulary development in children. Keywords: basic concept, vocabulary, preschool, assessmen

Vocabulary size influences spontaneous speech in native language users: Validating the use of automatic speech recognition in individual differences research

Previous research has shown that vocabulary size affects performance on laboratory word production tasks. Individuals who know many words show faster lexical access and retrieve more words belonging to pre-specified categories than individuals who know fewer words. The present study examined the relationship between receptive vocabulary size and speaking skills as assessed in a natural sentence production task. We asked whether measures derived from spontaneous responses to every-day questions correlate with the size of participants’ vocabulary. Moreover, we assessed the suitability of automatic speech recognition for the analysis of participants’ responses in complex language production data. We found that vocabulary size predicted indices of spontaneous speech: Individuals with a larger vocabulary produced more words and had a higher speech-silence ratio compared to individuals with a smaller vocabulary. Importantly, these relationships were reliably identified using manual and automated transcription methods. Taken together, our results suggest that spontaneous speech elicitation is a useful method to investigate natural language production and that automatic speech recognition can alleviate the burden of labor-intensive speech transcription

IMPROVING STUDENTS’ VOCABULARY MASTERY HROUGH THE USE OF WALL CHARTS IN ELEMENTARY STUDENTS

The objectives of this research are: (1) to find out whether wall charts can improve the English vocabulary mastery of the fifth grade elementary students (2) to find out students’ motivation when wall chart is used in teaching vocabulary. The research data were collected by using observation, interview, document, and test (pre-test and post-test). The data were analyzed through descriptive analysis which consists of assembling the data, coding the data, comparing the data, building interpretation, and reporting the outcomes for the qualitative data and descriptive statistics for the quantitative data. The research findings show that wall charts are able to improve students’ vocabulary mastery and students’ motivation. It shows that there was an improvement of the students’ vocabulary mastery before and after the research. Key words: action research, vocabulary, wall charts, motivatio

Process of Teaching Vocabulary to the 5th Grade Students at SDN Nglorog 3 Sragen

Triana Sri Rejeki. 2008. The Process of Teaching Vocabulary to The 5th Grade Students at SDN Nglorog III, Sragen. English Diploma Program, Faculty of Fine Arts, UNS. This final project is written based on my job training as an English teacher in SDN Nglorog 3, Sragen. The objectives of this report are to describe the process of teaching vocabulary to the 5th grade students in SDN Nglorog 3, Sragen and to show problems and solutions in teaching vocabulary. The writer collected the data by observing the classroom and teaching directly in the class. Some conclusions could be drawn after analyzing the data. In introducing English vocabulary, the teacher used some different techniques, such as: using pictures, playing games, introducing simple sentence, and bringing real object. During the job training, the writer took some activities, for instance: observing the class, making lesson plan, and teaching English. In the process of teaching vocabulary, the writer did some activities, such as: greeting, explaining, giving assignments, and testing. The writer also showed some problems in the process of teaching vocabulary. The problems were student’s motivation, facilities, and course book. The writer also presented the solution to solve the problems