learners speak, listen and write.
14
In other words, the first thing we have to learn when we learn a language is we have to master the vocabulary, because with
vocabulary, we can learn another language easier and will be useful for the process of achieving language teaching objectives, in other word, vocabulary is
the important subject in language learning, if students lack of vocabulary, they will face many obstacles.
In conclusion, vocabulary is a total words or phrases that maintain all information used by a person, class, or profession in communication and it is
important for students who are learning a language to make them easier in learning it.
2. Types of Vocabulary
There are many kind of vocabulary and many experts divide them into different categories. Read divided them into receptive and productive vocabulary.
While, Fromkin, Rodman, and Hyams classify words into content and function words. This is in line with Radford et. al. who classify words into two categories
which are lexical and functional words. Receptive vocabulary, sometimes called as passive vocabulary, defined as the
vocabulary associated with reading and listening materials, whereas the productive vocabulary refers to the vocabulary used as learners are learning the
writing or speaking skills. While productive vocabulary defined as words which are familiar or easy to recognize and often used by individual, particularly in
writing and speaking; while in contrast, receptive vocabulary are less used by students and not recognizable as students listen or read.
15
Meanwhile, content words are words used to describe things such as actions, objects, attributes and ideas. This kind of word has full meaning and provides
links between sentences. It consists of noun, verb, adjective and adverb. In contrast with content words, function words are words which do not have clear
14
Jack C. Richards and Willy A. Renandya, Methodology in Language Teaching, New York: Cambridge University Press, 2002, p. 225.
15
John Read, Assessing Vocabulary, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000, pp. 154- 155.
concept of meaning and are only used in the terms of grammatical function. In other words, it only has full meaning when they are integrated with other words.
This kind of word includes articles, pronoun, and preposition. A word does not always have one meaning. Sometimes, a word can have
many meaning. Moreover, Harmer said that what a word means is also defined by its relationship to other words.
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This means that sometimes students cannot guess a meaning of a word by a word itself. They have to see its relationship with the
other words. The relationship makes a word sometimes has more than one meaning. Those relationships are synonym, antonym, and hyponym.
Synonym is a word having the same or nearly the same meaning as another word in certain context, for example; depressed, sad, and miserable are synonym
because they have one same meaning which is unhappy. Antonym is a word that has contradicted meaning with other words. for example if someone asks what is
the opposite of hard then the answer will be soft. But one word can have more than one opposite. Therefore, teachers should lead students to aware about the
relationships between words and make them realize that it is possible for a word to have more than one antonym. Hyponymy is relationship where one word
includes others within a hierarchy, so there are superordinate words and subordinate words. For example, there is a word ‘flower’, which is the
superordinate words, and ‘rose’ and ‘orchid’ being the subordinates hyponyms of ‘flower’. Thus, ‘flower’ and ‘rose and orchid’ are co-hyponyms of each other.
In conclusion, there are many types of vocabulary. Some of them can be categorized by the division of language skills, such as receptive vocabulary which
is associated with receptive skills, while productive ones compromised with speaking and writing skill. Besides, vocabulary also can be classified based on its
parts of speech or word classes such as verb, noun, adjective, and etc. Then, beside classified based on part of speech, it also classified from its relationship
with other words.
16
Jeremy Harmer, How to Teach English, New York: Pearson, 2010, p. 61.
3.
Vocabulary Mastery
Vocabulary is one of language aspects which should be learned. Learning vocabulary is important as learners need it in order to be able to speak, wrote, read
and listen to a language. According to Cameron, a person is said to know a word if they can recognize its meaning when they see it.
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It means that in learning vocabulary it is important to know not only the meaning but also its use in a
particular context. According to Read, vocabulary is knowledge of knowing the meanings of
words and therefore the purpose of a vocabulary test is to find out whether the learners can match each word with a synonym, a dictionary, or an equivalent word
in their own language. In learning vocabulary students have to know the meaning of the words and be able to use it in sentences depends on the context.
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English has many words or even words families. According to Sebastian, here are the number of words need to be learned by English as a Second Language
Students; a. 1000 to 2000 high frequency words for basic conversations and everyday
texts; b. 8000 words for advanced conversations;
c. 10,000 to 20,000 word families excluding phrases and expressions to read at a university level.
In conclusion, vocabulary mastery can be defined as a number of words in a language which contains information about meaning, form, and usage in context.
Vocabulary mastery is not a spontaneous process which is easy to be done. Students have to read, and hear a lot of words and do a lot of practices expressing
it whether in spoken or written form.
17
Lynn Cameron, Teaching Languages to Young Learners, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001, p. 78.
18
Read, op. cit., p. 16.
C. Related Previous Study
