Minalabac Poetry: A Springboard For Vocabulary Enhancement

Abstract

One of the most important aspects of language learning is vocabulary, which serves as a bridge between the other five core skills of reading, writing, speaking, listening, and viewing. Vocabulary mastery is crucial in acquiring the fundamentals language learning. This study aimed to aimed to analyze the selected poetry about Minalabac using Formalism and design a workbook utilizing the analyzed words in the Minalabac Poems. Closed reading analysis was employed for analyzing the vocabulary in the selected poems. The analysis shows that on the 94 words analyzed, forty-eight words are nouns, fourteen verbs, twenty-eight adjectives, and two verbs and two pronouns. On the other hand, the denotative meanings of the words revealed that most of the words indicated things that can be found in the environment including the animals, plants, bodies of water, and some products made by the locals out of the coconuts and other things in nature. Additionally, descriptions on the current issues and situations of the environment were evident. The actions of the people and their way of living were also found out based on their denotative meanings. The connotations exposed that there were figures of speech used. The most used figures of speech are assonance and metaphor where 19 words fall into it respectively. Personification and Alliteration were also evident with 13 words each respectively. There were also words that fell into other figures of speech like two words fell under Oxymoron, five for Onomatopoeia, four for Anaphora, six words for Simile, eight words for Consonance, three for Symbolism, and two Repetition found. On the workbook, a variety of vocabulary exercises were included like crossword puzzles and word search puzzles. The activities have three levels -easy, moderate, and hard. The primary goal of the study is to help students be acquainted with the meanings of the words so that they may use these words on their daily contexts.