15
together in a meaningful way” Altman, et. al., 1985: 87. This is called organization. The fundamental role of organization is formulating the complexity
of information becomes effortless for someone to interpret.
c. Situation
“The situation which influences someone to perceive can be in the form of someone’s familiarity with, expectations about, or his or her past experience”
Altman, et al., 1985: 89. It can be concluded that situation may be the combination between someone’s past experience with his or her expectations. If
someone has bad experience on something in the past, she will tend to perceive negatively when acquiring the same stimuli in advance. On the contrary, in case
she has good experience towards something, she will have good expectation to achieve when similar thing happens in the future.
d. Self-Concept
Warga 1985: 90 stated “what is called self-concept is the way we feel about and perceive ourselves.” The self-concept is essential since our
psychological image of ourselves determines much of what then we perceive and do. If the student sees himselfherself as a persistent student, she will likely to be
persistent no matter difficulties in learning await.
2. Teaching and Learning Vocabulary
The researcher aims to investigate the students’ perceptions on the vocabulary weekly tests. Hence, discussing learning and teaching vocabulary in
the section is very fundamental. Historically, in foreign language teaching,
16
vocabulary has not been given an adequate amount of attention for a long time. Many course books merely prioritize structure and function. In actual fact,
vocabulary can support learners to learn the skills of the language. Burton 1982: 99 declared that vocabulary should be given to the students suitably, hence they
are able to learn four skills of language, namely listening, speaking, reading and writing better. This claim implies that English vocabulary is very important
language component in learning a language. In this section, there are two parts of discussion, namely teaching
vocabulary and learning vocabulary. These two parts will offer an appropriate context to interpret vocabulary as an important basis in English language.
a. Teaching Vocabulary
English in recent days has been used as the lingua franca of international communication, scientific and modern technology, trade and political exchange.
Hence, it plays a central role to transmit information in the world. Mastering English now grows to be an obligation, not only for prestige but more than that for
the sake of knowledge to compete in the globalization. Realizing this fact, vocabulary as the basic element in mastering English should be taught in an
appropriate way. There is a need to conduct teaching vocabulary in order to introduce a number of English words as a basic step to learn English.
Brown 1987: 7 claimed ”teaching is guiding and facilitating learning, enabling the learner to learn, setting the conditions for learning.” It means that
teaching provides learners guidance and offers supporting condition to learn. According to Lado 1964: 120, in the past, vocabulary was taught mostly by