Yogyakarta on how vocabulary learning can be learned in a completely different,
meaningful way.
F. Definition of Terms
As the reader reads the paper, there will be several important terms, which the researcher may need to define so as not to bring confusion and
misunderstanding to the reader. The terms include guessing from context, vocabulary learning, and first semester students of the English Extension Course.
1. Guessing from Context
Guessing from context has been long identified and included as one of the strategies which language learners employ to acquire a new language. The
strategy was mentioned by J. Michael O’Malley and Anna Uhl Chamot in their book, Learning Strategies, published in 1990. Several experts have proposed their
own procedures for guessing from context. Clarke and Nation’s guessing from
context procedure was the one used by the researcher in the experimental study. 2.
Vocabulary Learning Perhaps the best definition of vocabulary learning can be summed up from
Schmitt 1997, who defined vocabulary learning strategy as “any strategy that
results in the learning of vocabulary” as cited in Ozturk, p. 21. From that concept, the researcher concludes that vocabulary learning is any process which
“results in the learning of vocabulary”.
3. The First Semester Students of English Extension Course
This experimental research involved one class of first semester students of English Extension Course of academic year 20111012. English Extension Course
is a course managed by lecturers of both English Education and English Letters Study Program at Sanata Dharma University. They underwent a pretest, learned
Clarke and Nation’s guessing from context procedure, took a posttest, and filled out the questionnaire devised by the researcher in order to find out how they
perceived the guessing from context procedure.
10
CHAPTER II REVIEW OF RELATED LITERATURE
This chapter provides the theories underlying the study. These include the theories of experimental research, guessing from context, the dependent t-test, and
the null hypothesis.
A. Theoretical Description
The first part of this chapter covers several theories that were useful and central to the study. The researcher begins with the theory of guessing from
context as a vocabulary learning technique. Following the discussion of the first theory, the researcher reviews the t-test and null hypothesis theory.
1. Guessing from Context as a Vocabulary Learning Technique
Nation 1990 claims guessing from context as one of “the most important
vocabulary learning strategy” p. 130. In spite of this, not many second language learners employ the technique as a means of acquiring new vocabulary items they
encounter in daily life, especially in reading passages or newspaper articles. Instead of using guessing from context to obtain the meaning of novel words, they
learn the new words they encounter by learning them in isolation. In other words, they take the words they wish to learn out of their context. As mentioned before,
the researcher would like to reiterate that learning foreign language words by taking them out of context does help students acquire new words as one can learn
a lot of new words by using this particular technique in a short time. Nation
Kategori