Abstract
This study aimed to analyze the vocabulary size and mastery level of English department students. The present study employed a descriptive-quantitative research design. The subjects of the study were the first, third, and fifth semester students majoring in English language education at Institut Agama Islam Negeri Ponorogo. Three-hundred and nineteen students participating in this study were given the Vocabulary Levels Test (VLT) to measure their English vocabulary size. The findings of the present study reveal that the students only knew about 1,366-word families. The result was still below the threshold, as suggested by the scholars. The findings also show that the participants had a very low mastery level. They did not even master the 2,000 or 3,000 high-frequency word level. It can be concluded that the participants had low vocabulary proficiency. The results of the study suggest that the future research is needed to focus on investigating vocabulary learning and instructional strategies that are effective in developing the students' high-frequency words and academic words.
Highlights
In the Indonesian context, English has become a crucial language for every student
To find out the mean English vocabulary size of the English Department students of Institut Agama Islam Negeri Ponorogo, we included all the results of the students according to the length of study: the first, third, and, fifth semester of study
It can be construed that the average vocabulary size of the first-year students in the English Department was approximately 1296 word-families
Summary
Starting from elementary up to the university level, English has been learned as a foreign language. English has been learned since elementary school, students still find difficulties in mastering this language because of many factors, such as lack of vocabulary, grammar rules, and spelling. Kilic states [1] that many foreign language learners lack vocabulary mastery, which makes them difficult to express their ideas in English. Language learners may have inadequate time to learn English in the classroom. They need to improve their receptive vocabulary level by listening and reading in the target language as much as possible. Teachers need to have a variety of activities in the classroom to introduce some new vocabulary every meeting and help students to work by themselves with guidance to reach the goal of receptive vocabulary mastery
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