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3. Other Researcher
Finally, the researcher who are interested in the teaching of English at Junior High School get useful information from the result of this study and
leading them to further research on different aspect field.
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CHAPTER II THEORETICAL FRAMEWORK
A. Vocabulary Mastery
Vocabulary is very important in English teaching and learning. If the learners do not know the meaning of the words, they will have difficulty in
understanding what they see, read, and learn. Their vocabulary will increase if they read more words. This reason makes vocabulary very important; a bad
vocabulary will cause bad understanding of the text.
Vocabulary has an important role in determining the successful achievement of each skill. Daily communication needs vocabulary. The more
vocabulary the learners have, the more easily they will communicate and express what they want to say. The four language skills that are listening,
speaking, reading, and writing always include vocabulary in their activities. By having a lot of vocabularies learner will be easier to show their ideas,
making compositions, and many other activities dealing with language. In other words, by knowing and understanding the vocabulary, learners will
successfully achieve the four English language skills.
1. Definition of Vocabulary
Vocabulary is considered to be the main focus of learning a foreign language since there is a belief that learning a foreign language is similar to
learning its vocabulary, in order to comprehend more about why vocabulary has an important role in learning the language, it is better to look at the
definition of the vocabulary first. In Webster’s dictionary, we can see that vocabulary is defined as follows:
a A list or collection of words and phrases usually alphabetically
arranged and explained or defined b
A sum or stock of words employed by a language group individual or work or in relation to a subject: scope of language
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c A list of a foreign language textbook of the words and phrases taught
or used
1
According to Hornby, vocabulary is:
2
a. All the words that a person knows or uses
b. All the words in a particular language
c. The words that people use when they are talking about particular subject
d. A list of words with their meaning, especially in a book for learning foreign
language.
The writer observes that this definition is different from the definition before. The writer summarizes that vocabulary is all the words that a person knows
and uses in a language with their meanings. In this definition the writer get complete meaning.
Mastery of a language is taken to mean the ability to use or even to understand all the words of the language, then none of us can be said to have
mastered his own native language. In other words, we know the word for those areas of life or some fields with which we have had some experience.
However, none of us can know all the “words” of our language. Knowledge of new words and new meaning keep increasing as we grow
older and we are often very conscious of this growth and change. As we all may know, vocabulary is very important to improve our knowledge. We can
find all information that we want by understanding our reading. As the English teachers, we can give our student some ways to make them interested
in mastering their vocabulary. We do not much time just for looking up the difficult word in dictionary.
Schmitt Broadly defined “We must consider what we mean by vocabulary. The first idea that probably springs to mind is words, a
formulation that is admirably adequate for the layperson”.
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1
Philip Babvock Gove, Webster’s Third New International Dictionary Massachusetts:
Heinle Publisher, 1996, p. 2560.
2
AS Hornby, Oxford Advanced Learner’s Dictionary of Current English, Sixth Edition,
London: Oxford University Press, 2000, p.1447
3
Norbert Schmitt, Vocabulary in Language Teaching, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000, p.1.
