commit to user 8
CHAPTER II THEORIES UNDERLYING THE STUDY
A. Theoretical Description 1. Vocabulary Mastery
a. Definition of Vocabulary
There are some experts who propose the definitions of vocabulary. Hatch and Brown 1995: 1 stated that vocabulary refers to a list of a set of
words that individual speaker of a language might use. The definition given by Hatch and Brown means that there is more than one words that being used
for a certain language. Paul 1978: 1229 said that vocabulary can be defined as a list words,
usually in alphabetical order and with explanations of their meanings, less complete than a dictionary.
Burns 1975: 295 also stated that vocabulary is the stock of words used by a person, a class or profession. From this definition it can be
concluded that every individual use several different vocabularies. The next definition is proposed by Ur 1996: 60. Ur says that
vocabulary can be defined, roughly, as the words we teach in the foreign language. In this definition vocabulary is not the native language of the
learners. Vocabulary is the words being taught in a foreign course. From the statements above can be concluded that vocabulary refers to
stocks of words that learned as foreign language by individual speakers.
commit to user 9
b. Kinds of Vocabulary
Notion 2008: 7 divides vocabulary into four levels on the basis of how often it occurs in the language. They are high frequency words,
academic words, technical words, and low frequency words. These levels can be explained as bellow:
1 High Frequency Words High frequency words are the most important group of words.
These words occur very frequently in all kinds of use of the language. They are needed in formal and informal uses of the
language. The high frequency words of English have the following
characteristics. a Each high frequency word occurs very often, so the effort of
learning it will be repaid by plenty of opportunities to meet and use it.
b The high frequency words are useful no matter what use is made of English.
c Because of the frequency and wide range they make up a very large proportion of the running words in all kinds of texts and
language use. d They are relatively small group of words that could be covered
in a school program over three to five years.
commit to user 10
2 Academic Words Academic words are words that are not appear in daily
conversation frequently, less than 25 percent of the running words in conversation are from the academic words list, but frequent and
widely used within specialized area. These words are very important for learners who will use English for academic study
either in upper secondary schools or technical institutes academic words occur in all kinds of academic subject areas like Botany,
Politics, Accounting, and Family Law 3 Technical Words
Technical words occur in more specialized area than academic words. These words are very important for anyone who specializes
in a particular area. There have not been many statistical studies of technical vocabulary, but it seems that at least 20 percent of the
running words in most technical texts, such as anatomy text and economics text, are likely to be technical words.
4 Low Frequency words This last words group is the biggest group among the other three.
Low frequency words are a diverse group. They include 1 words that are not quite frequent or wide range enough to be high
frequency words, 2 technical words from other areas one person’s technical vocabulary is another person’s low frequency
commit to user 11
vocabulary, and 3 words that just occur rarely. Low frequency words have the following characteristics.
a Each word does not occur very often. b Most low frequency words have a very narrow range. They are
not needed in every use of the language. c The low frequency words make up a very small proportion of
the running words in a text. d They are a very large group of words.
The usage of those kinds of vocabulary above can be shown from the table below.
English has an enormous spool of vocabulary. No one, even native speakers, is able to know them all. Fortunately, we do not need to know them
all in order to use English. We only need to know those that are relevant to our practical purposes.
Level Number of Words Text Coverage,
High-frequency words 2,000
87 Academic vocabulary
800 8
Technical vocabulary 2,000
3 Low-frequency words
123,200 2
Total 128,000
100
commit to user 12
c. The importance of vocabulary
Kategori