11 CHAPTER II
THEORETICAL REVIEW
A. The Review on Vocabulary
1. The Definition of Vocabulary
As explained in the background of the study, vocabulary takes such a fundamental role in mastering English as foreign language well. There are
some definitions of vocabulary proposed by some experts. Horby 1995: 31 mentions his definition of vocabulary as the total
number of words in a language and vocabulary as a list of words with their meanings. Hatch and Brown 1995:1 argue that the term vocabulary refers to
a list or set of words for a particular language or words that individual speakers of language might use.
Burns and Broman 1975: 295 define vocabulary as the stock of words that used by person, class, or profession. The meaning is clear enough
that in almost cases of human life, they use set of words. The use of the words itself differentiated according to the field, class, person, or profession. It means
that beggar use set of words to ask for some money to rich people, a teacher also use set of words to explain material to the students, a father use set of
words to talk to his child, and there are many other examples that show us in most of human’s waking time they use set of words to do the activity.
However, the use of set of words are different between one person and another
person, therefore Burns and Broman emphasized on the three area of using stock words namely person, classs, and profession.
According to Ur 1996:60 vocabulary can be defined roughly as the words teacher teaches in the foreign language. The term “words” here means
that the new item of vocabulary maybe more than a single word, for example,
father -in-law
and
police office
, which are made up from two or more words but express a single definition or idea. In other case there are also compund
words called as multi-word idioms, for example
call it a day
, where the meaning of the phrase cannot be deduced from an analysis of the component
words. To maintain and cover all such cases, there is a useful converntion which is talking about vocabulary items rather than talking about words.
From the definition above, it can be concluded that vocabulary is a setlist of words of a particular language that individual speakers of a language
might use which is differentiated according to person, class, and profession. Since this research takes four grade students of SD Negeri Karangputat 01 as
the subject and English vocabulary as an object, vocabulary in this research is limited into a setlist of English words which is close to
the students’ world that should be taught so that they would use the words.
2. The Types of Vocabulary
Kategori