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families the students have for written receptive use as estimated by Nation
2001. The vocabulary size is counted in the level of word family. For instance, when the students know the meaning of the word play, plays, played and playing,
then they have known one word family as those words are in one word family play. They are words with inflectional endings.
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CHAPTER II THEORETICAL REVIEW AND CONCEPTUAL
FRAMEWORK
Theories of vocabulary, morpheme, and morphological awareness will be presented in this chapter to achieve a comprehensive understanding of the area of
the research. Moreover, the conceptual framework will be constructed to get the pre-understanding of the research.
However, the previous studies will be presented first before the theoretical review to give a brief understanding about this current study regarding to the
previous studies in the same area. Morin in 2003 conducted a study and she proposed the strategy of using morphological knowledge in inferring word
meanings. She suggested that there was an urgent need for the teacher to develop morphological awareness for the L2 learners especially for guessing meaning
from the context. Morphological knowledge was essential for L2 learners to develop their skills in guessing. Moreover, Zhang and Koda in 2011 investigated
the contribution of morphological awareness and lexical inferring ability to L2 vocabulary knowledge and reading comprehension among advanced EFL learners.
They found that morphological awareness contributed to L2 vocabulary knowledge directly and indirectly through the mediation of learners’ lexical
inferring ability. Similarly, Chang, C. M., Wagner, R. K., Muse, A., Chow, H. S. 2005, and Schiff Calif, 2007 found that some aspects of morphological
awareness might be useful for vocabulary building. The last study was conducted
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by Tabatabei in 2011.The study revealed that the L2 learners can develop their vocabulary better when vocabulary was taught by morphological analyses rather
than through more traditional class instruction methods. The studies above showed that there was a contribution of the morphological awareness to
vocabulary knowledge. However, they did not detailed picture in this area.
Hence, further study is urgent to model the complex relations between the variables within an integrated framework.
A. Theoretical Review
The theoretical review covers the theories of the study. The first theory is about the vocabulary. It will cover some sub-chapters that will discuss definition
of vocabulary, knowing a word, importance of vocabulary, kinds of vocabulary, number of words, vocabulary size, words to count, choosing words to test, as well
as receptive and productive vocabulary. The second theory is about morpheme. It covers the sub-chapters of morpheme definition, morpheme identification
awareness, and morphological structure awareness.
1. Vocabulary
This part will present the concept of vocabulary size which includes the theories of vocabulary, knowing a word, kinds of vocabulary, importance of
vocabulary, vocabulary size for reading, and vocabulary learning and acquisition. The theories will uncover the nature of vocabulary and specifically give clearer
understanding on how vocabulary can influence the language acquisition.
