Vocabulary of EFL Learners (Academic Year 2015) in Learning English at FKIP UHN Pematangsiantar

Abstract

There are two questions raised in this research they are: (1) How many vocabularies do university students typically have at Vocabulary class on semester III at FKIP UHN? (2) What specific program or learning strategy should be given to increase vocabulary size to make the vocabulary class sucess? The objectives of the research are to find out how many the vocabulary an average students typically have at vocabulary class on semester III at FKIP UHN and to find out some methods and techniques that are appropriate to increase vocabulary size tomake the vocabulary class sucess. There are enomous studies on vocabulary knowledge conducted during the rise of the Lexical Approach in the 1990s. Many researchers were conducted to answer the questions such as: (1) How many words are there in a dictionary? (2) How many words does an average educated native speaker have? (3) How many words should a non-native speaker have to study in college? (4) What words are worth learning for a non-native speaker studying in college? And (5) What are the approriate strategies to learn the vocabulary needed in the university level? The answers for those questions have also been obtained. The answer to the question number one for example, was based on a research conducted by Goulden, Nation and Read in 1990 (Nation, 2001:6). There are two subjects that the writer will analyze in this research. Firstly,the 1953 General Service List, another research subject of the resarch is the students (academic year 2015) taking Vocabulary subject at English Department at FKIP UHN Pematangsiantar. The writer found that nouns came up the most frequent (1,177 words), followed by verbs (568 words), adjectives (358 words), adverbs (99 words) and other kind of parts of speech (prepositions, conjunctions, pronoun, and interjections) totalingup to 2,284 words. Secondly, the writer separated the list into stems and formed words. From the separation, the writer found 625 words related to suffixation-both the stems and suffixed words. The number would be greaterif we put prefixation and similarbase words (every, some) before words. From this research, the writer concludes that the strategy cannot be applied in guessing the meaning of a word in a sentence because there is too little information we can get from a sentence. The writer also concludes that learning parts of speech and word formation are appropriate to enlarge vocabulary size.