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f. Vocabulary Size
There is a totally ambitious goal for EFL learner to know all words in the language. It is almost impossible for a language learner especially who learn L2 or
foreign language to know all words in the target language. Even a native speaker does not know all words in the language. There are, what Nation called,
‘specialized vocabulary” that only a small group of people in the area who know the words. To have better understanding of this area, Nation differentiates the
word counted that fall into four categories. They are tokens, types, lemmas, and word families.
Tokens are the running words in the sentence, clause, paragraph, or text. Whatever words occur, it is counted as tokens. The way is simply to count the
words occur even if they are the same words. For example, the sentence ‘ I have
to go to the market’ has seven tokens, even though it occurs twice in the sentence. Types are rather different from tokens. If we see the same word again, we do not
count it again. So in the sentence ‘ I have to go to the market’, there are six types as the second it is not counted. Lemmas consist of headword and some of its
inflected and reduced n’t form. Usually all items included under the lemmas are in the same part of speech Francis and Kucera in Nation, 2001. Hence, the plural,
present tense, past tense, past participle, comparative, superlative, -ing, possessive are under the same lemma. The emphasis of the lemmas is that the words are in
the same part of speech. The idea of the lemmas is lying behind the learning burden. The learning burden of an item is the amount of effort required to learn it
Nation, 2001. Word families are the last thing to count about the words of the
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language. If lemmas only focus on inflectional forms, word families deal with both inflectional and derivational forms. This includes the affixes like – ment, -ly,
-ness, pre-, un-, etc. The major problem in counting the words by using word families is to decide what should be included in the word family and what should
not. It is inevitably true that the learner’s knowledge of affixes develop as he gains
more experience of the language. What a learner may be familiar to certain word families may not happen to the other learners. It is necessary to set up the scale of
the word families from the elementary level or the simplest one to the less obvious possibilities.
The vocabulary size of the second and foreign learners aims at knowing to the number of vocabulary a learner has in a certain time of his language
acquisition. If the native speakers grow their vocabulary through direct teaching and accidental learning in their growth, second and foreign learners tend to have
merely direct teaching and limited accidental learning. Nation 2001 proposes two methods of measuring vocabulary size. They
are based on sampling from a dictionary and a corpus or frequency list derived from corpus. The dictionary-based method involves choosing a dictionary that is
large enough to contain all the words the learners might know. Whereas the corpus-based method can be applied in two ways: to collect corpus in a language
used by a person or group of people and see how many words it consists of. This current study capitalizes vocabulary size as the number of words of
which some aspects of meaning are known by the learners. Vocabulary size is contrasted to vocabulary depth that refers to how well a word is known. In
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addition, this current study more specifically focuses on the written receptive vocabulary size, that is the number of words required for reading.
g. Words to Count
This question may result more fundamental question about what involves in knowing a word. Another crucial issue related to the question is about what is
included to be in a word. It may involve the issue of the proper noun such as Tim, Davis, or Cathrine to be as a word, or we can also involve foreign word like
perestroika, Latin term, or Sanskrit to be included as a word as well. This should be a decision about the issues of the question as it will affect to the counting of the
word size. However, by referring to the British National Corpus frequency list, the
ideal unit of counting the words is based on the word family. Word family is chosen, rather than the word type or lemma, firstly because research has shown
that word families are psychologically real. Secondly, knowing one members of word family and having control of the most common and regular word-building
process make it possible to work out the meaning of previously unmet member of family Nagy, Anderson, Schommer, Scott Stallman, 1989; Bertram, Laine, and
Virkkala, 2000.
h. Choosing Words to Test
It has been hard to choose the words to test by the teacher. It happens especially in dictionary-based vocabulary size and becomes the major source of
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