In short, vocabulary is all the words that are known and used when discussing in a particular book, subject, and language by someone. It means, vocabulary is
really important in daily life, so it can be the reason why people really need to increase their vocabulary.
2. The Importance of Vocabulary
Vocabulary is really important in a language. If students do not have many vocabulary, they will hard to understand a material that their teacher teaches
especially in English and misunderstanding about what other people say or write. If students have many vocabularies, they can use English well to utter their
opinion, idea, feeling as long as they know a topic that they are talking about. Moreover, they will understand a message when they are reading English book, or
material that is written in English by a writer. Acording to Sarwono and Purwanto, there are two main reasons why people
should learn vocabulary. First, people want other to understand what they say. The second reason is people want to understand what other people say. Moreover,
people do not want other to misunderstand in their communication.
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It means that people use words in their daily life, people communicate with others directly
talking, discussing or indirectly writing a book, writing a letter or note. If someone does not understand about what other talk or write about, it will be
a problem. For instance, there is an English teacher who gives her student a note for borrowing some storybooks at school library, because the teacher rush to meet
principle, the teacher does not explain about the note. But, the student does not understand about the note, he thinks his teacher asked for borrowing textbooks at
the library as usual. So, he goes to the library for borrowing some textbooks. When his teacher comes to the class, the teacher asks student to open a certain page in
4
Jonathan Sarwono and Yudhy Purwanto, English for Academic Purpose, Yogyakarta: Andi Offset, 2013, p. 192.
storybook, but no one of her students open the storybook, because the student who were given a note by her, he borrowed wrong books. The illustration above will be
an obstacle in teaching and learning process, because of shortage of students’ vocabulary.
3
. Selecting Vocabulary
The aim of teaching English at junior high school in curriculum 1994 is students have to master 1000 vocabularies.
5
But, in curriculum 2006 the number of vocabulary students must master is not stated. Learning vocabulary will be
successful, if teachers consider what kind of vocabulary that students need to study.
So, selecting vocabulary is really important. There are two principles in selecting vocabulary. The first is frequency.
According to McCarten, teachers should teach the most words that people talk about first, then they teach the less frequent words later.
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Frequency in selecting vocabulary means teacher should consider about words that they should teach on
the basis of how frequently they are used by speakers of the language. The words that should be taught first are that of most commonly used.
The second is contexts of use. It is really important to know about words that are used by people in different kinds of situations. For example, formal usage is
more important than informal usage in polite situations with strangers or work colleagues, etc.
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Students who learn English at school, they will get more words for formal usage, because, students are often asked by their school to join a
competition. For example, they are asked to debate, speech contest, and etc. Those
5
Aswir Astaman, A. Rifai, and Yeyet Maryati, Laporan Penelitian Tindakan Kelas Meningkatkan P e n g u a s a a n K o s a k a t a B a h a s a I n g g r i s , 2 0 1 6 . R e t r i e v e d f r o m
http:menulisbersamaaswir.blogspot.co.id201003meningkatkan-penguasaan-kosakata-bahasa.html.
6
Jeanne McCarten, Teaching Vocabulary, US: Cambridge University Press, 2007, p. 4.
7
Ibid., p. 5.
competition are prefer to use formal language. So, it is really important to decide words based on the contexts of use.
4. Synonym and Antonym
So many words in a language, yet, there are words that have same meaning and there are words that have opposite meaning. Those words that share a similar
meaning are synonyms.
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For example, when a teacher asks his student who are noisy in the class to calm down. He says “silent, please” or “please, be quite”. The
two words that maybe the teacher uses to command his student to be calm are synonym. Some synonyms are interchangeable, for instance, cab and taxi. Both of
them have similar meaning. Meanwhile, words that have opposite meaning is antonym. It is not like
synonym which have same meaning, antonym is word that have opposite meaning of another word. Yet, according to Thornbury, the relation between opposite words
are not always black and white.
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It means, students who are learning English have to choose antonym of word carefully. For example, the opposite of h
e is an “old man” is he is a “young man”, but the opposite of they have an “old phone”, they
have to buy a “new one” not a “young one”. It is not easy to find antonym of word,
it should be considered based on the situation or context.
5. Homonym
Homonym is a words that share same pronunciation and same spelling but it has different meaning.
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For example, it is not “fair” and she has a “fair” skin, in both sentences there is a word “fair” which has same spelling and pronunciation,
8
Scott Thornbury, How to Teach Vocabulary, UK: Pearson Education Limited, 2002, p. 9.
9
Ibid.
10
Ibid.
