CHAPTER 5

CHAPTER 5
Discussion 5.1. English Vocabulary Size The first research question concerned the size of the English vocabularies of Indonesian senior high school students in the study, as reflected in their performance on the VLT, and whether there was a difference between the Social Science and Natural Science groups. The vocabulary size score was assumed to highlight the students’ vocabulary proficiency after studying English for almost 5 years. The results revealed that the students performed better in doing the vocabulary test at the 2000 level than at the 3000 and 5000 levels of the VLT. This indicates a better result compared with the previous study by Nurweni and Read (1999, as cited in Nur, 2004), who found that the average first year Indonesian university student only masters about 1226 English words. This conclusion is based on two considerations: 1. Simply referring to Zimmerman (2005), the scores on the VLT test can be used to provide a rough estimate of the vocabulary size. For example, if a participant can answer correctly 9 items out of 18 items in 1000 level, it can be assumed that he/she knows roughly 500 out of the 1000 words families from that level. Thus, in the present study, on average the students obtained the score 62%. It can be calculated then that they know approximately 1240 words. 2. The participants in the current study are assumed to learn English in a shorter term compared to the participants in the previous study. The first year Indonesian university students in the former study are in 34 general assumed to have already learnt English for six years, while the grade 12 students of senior high school in the latter study are generally assumed to have studied English for five years. Beside the two considerations, it is also interesting to evaluate the vocabulary threshold level for senior high school students (4000- 5000 words) confirmed by Nurweni and Read (1999, as cited in Nur, 2004). Nagy and Anderson (1984) found that there was a lack of agreement among the researchers about an absolute vocabulary size for any given age or development level. Similarly, Zechmeister, et al. (1993) stated that there are many apparent logical inconsistencies in vocabulary-size literature. In addition, most of the thresholds proposed are intended for English L1 users, not ESL or EFL learners. Therefore, it is interesting to consider a discussion in Nagy and Anderson (1984) about getting the real picture of the students’ vocabulary size through the number of words they have to deal with in school reading. Hence, information on the amount and type of reading done by the students in and out of school is required to reanalyze the vocabulary size by grade level. Nagy and Anderson (1984) considered the pages of texts the students read at school per day, as well as the speed of the words they read per minute to estimate the vocabulary size that the students should have. Applying this calculation into the Indonesian context, the threshold confirmed by the previous study could be unrealistic because of some limitations in Indonesian senior high schools. First, English is taught for four and/or six hours meeting (one hour meeting is approximately 40 minutes). During that time, all four skills - listening, reading, writing and speaking - are taught to the students, not only reading. Second, most of the students get the reading sources only at school, not at their home environment. Therefore, on average the English passage the 35 students read each day will be very limited with a low word-reading rate as well. Thus, in this present study, the judgement on the vocabulary threshold level of the senior high school in Indonesia is not provided. However, it can be a consideration for the research in the future. The one-way ANOVA test across the two groups of participants, Social Science and Natural Science, did not show a significant difference on the vocabulary measure. This may go against a common perception, especially in Indonesia, about Natural Science students, who are usually assumed to have better performance in language tests than students from the Social Science program. This result also revealed that there is no significant difference between the two groups in their performance on VLT, even though they had different results in their general English proficiency (as indicated by the average scores in the semester’s summative test). 5.2. Morphological Awareness The second question addressed in the study concerns the level of morphological awareness possessed by the participants in the study. As in the first question, there was also interest in how the two groups compared. For the Morpheme Identification test, the results show that the students could perform well in choosing one target picture as the one that best corresponded to the meaning of the morpheme intended. However, the results also show the appearance of a ceiling effect, which is consistent with the previous study by Chang et al. (2005). The students answered the questions very well and more than 50% of the participants obtained the maximal score, 100%. This ceiling effect is assumed to cause the test items to be less reliable (the analyses of the test reliability 36 resulted an alpha coefficient of .03.). The limited number of questions had been assumed the main cause for this effect. The appearance of the ceiling effect may be also because the items in the Morpheme Identification tasks were modified in this study, different from the previous study by Chang et al. (2005). Unlike the Morpheme Identification measure, the Morphological Structure results were of satisfactory reliability (the analyses of the test reliability ensured that with an alpha coefficient of .79.). The resulting t-tests showed a significant difference between the performance of students from Social Science and Natural Science in this Morphological Structure test, but not on the Morpheme Identification test. On the Morphological Structure test, the mean for the Social Science group was 10.80 (SD = 3.59), somewhat less than the Natural Science group 13.47 (SD = 3.32). In addition, the range of Social Science students’ scores is also larger than the score range of Natural Science students, showing greater variability in responses by the Social Science students. An analysis of the Morphological Structure items shows the students performed approximately 14% better in compounding words than using their syntax knowledge to create new words (the mean frequency of the former and the latter are approximately 64% and 50% respectively). Other patterns were found in a further analysis of each item in the Morphological Structure test. In forming new compounds by stringing together other words, the participants show better performance when the target words were in the same grammatical category such as noun + noun, such as in milk glass (item 5) and tea cup
(item 4). However, none of the students answered correctly when they were asked to create donut tree (item 6) after they were given apple tree as a compound word from 37
apples and tree (see appendix, Morphological Structure test, question 6). This could be linked to the different features of the two target words, one is plural (apples and donuts), another is singular (tree). The participants could not apply their syntactic knowledge about the importance of deleting –s ending from donuts to form the compound donut tree. Similarly, the participants could not perform well in compounds formed with a preposition. There were only 11 students who answered over-ground train (item 12) correctly after being given example in the same category, under-ground train to indicate
train that runs over the ground (see appendix, Morphological Structure test, question 12). Most of the students did not exclude the verb runs from their answer, thus most of the answers were runs over ground train. In the second part of the Morphological Structure test, using inflectional morphology to understand novel words, some trends emerge in the participants’ performance. The students show better performance in applying the –ed and –ing suffixes as the marker for past and present participle (see appendix, Morphological Structure test, question 15, 18, and 19) with 81%, 60% and 66% correct answer respectively. However, they seem to have problem in using the –ing suffix for making frogging from frogs as an association to the example of raindrops and raining (see appendix, Morphological Structure test, question 20). Moreover, the students obtained a low mean average in applying the –es suffix as the marker for plurality. There are only 10% of the students answered correctly for huxes (item 17), even though they performed better in applying –s suffix for wugs (item 16) with 56% correct answers. In a previous study, Lyytinen and Lyytinen (2004) suggest that early identification of grammatical markers is important for children because the markers may 38 persist and influence the children’s following language development. Noun inflections were acquired early; followed by verb inflections; and finally verb and adjective inflections at the following age. The results of the present study do not support this result. The participants here performed better in understanding verb inflections than noun inflections. Thus, an alternative explanation suggested by Adams and Huggins (1985, as cited in Wysocki and Jenkins 1987) can be taken into consideration. The ability to use contextual information to identify words depended not on age or development level, but mainly on the familiarity with the target words. This may also explain the result of the present study. Next, analyzing the students’ perception of their performance on the two morphological awareness tasks, their comments on the Morpheme Identification test suggests that this task may have tapped semantic association knowledge by its use of pictures. However, it is assumed that pictures were needed to represent two homophones since the tests were given in written form, not in an oral one. Most of the students choosing the Morpheme Identification to be their preference commented that the pictures made it easier for them to guess the target words. On the other hand, most of the students choosing the Morphological Structure test to be their preference wrote that they liked this test because they could apply their analysis of the example given to get the target words. This point is consistent with the previous study by Chang et al. (2005). In their study, they argued that through the Morphological Structure test, the children were asked to combine morphemes in new ways. Noticing similarities across words, the children could build on their morphological knowledge, and it was more efficient for them to learn new 39 words. With knowledge of morphemes, children found it easier to understand new vocabulary by generalizing the morphemes to new contexts. 5.3. The Relationship between Morphological Awareness and English Vocabulary Knowledge The third research question concerned the possible relationship between performance on the VLT vocabulary measure and the morphological awareness test, and whether there are differences between the Social Science and Natural Science groups in this regard. Consistent with the previous study by Chang et al. (2005), the results for the group as a whole reveal that there is a significant association between these two variables, vocabulary size and morphological awareness. However, because this is a correlational study, the causal relationship among them cannot be predicted. In addition, when the two morphological awareness measures were correlated there was a low correlation coefficient, indicating that they were measuring different kinds of knowledge, at least to some degree. However, when analyzing the correlation both between the VLT and Morpheme Identification task and between the VLT and Morphological Structure task for the two groups (Social Science and Natural Science) separately, the results were partly inconsistent (refer Table 6). The Social Science group showed a significant correlation between the VLT and Morpheme Identification, however, the Natural Science group showed the opposite result – a significant correlation between the VLT and Morphological Structure test. This unusual result is difficult to fully explain. 40 The strong correlation between the Social Science students’ scores in the VLT and the Morpheme Identification task may be linked to the easy level of the questions in this task and the fact that there were only five questions. Also, the fact that the researcher modified this task from the one used by Chang et al. (2005) may affect the results. On the other hand, the Social Science students did not have good results in Morphological Structure. This could be because Bahasa Indonesia and English have a lack of similarities in their morphological features. In contrast, the students from the Natural Science program performed significantly better in the Morphological Structure measure. One possible reason for this result may be linked to the average of their general English proficiency. As stated before, the students from this program performed better in their semester summative test than the students from Social Science. Another reason may relate to the nature of the Natural Science program. The main subjects in this program are mathematics and sciences, which deal mostly with applying patterns and rules in solving problems. This background may help the students from the Natural Science program to build knowledge in Morphological Structure better than the students from the Social Science program, who may not study subjects that have as much focus on problem solving. When the Natural Science students noticed similarities across words, they are building on their morphological knowledge. Also, as they acquire new vocabulary, they can analyze vocabulary items into sublexical components such as morphemes more easily. Further research is needed on this issue. Supporting the results of the correlational analysis, most of the students also wrote about their interest in applying the concept of morphological awareness to their vocabulary learning. The interest is sparked by the willingness in applying the patterns 41 they found in the examples to learn new words. This interest made the students more motivated and realized that learning English and English vocabulary was interesting. Some students wrote in their comments about this morphological awareness test:
I can easily imitate the examples (student 52)
I like doing this test because it is interesting and enjoyable (student 37)
Doing this test encourages my interest to find the words’ meaning (student 57)
I like this test because, in my opinion, it will be easy for me to memorize the
words by remembering the examples (student 18)
I like the test because it makes me think about applying the concept in the
examples given to find the target word (student 62).
I like this test because I need to think more when I try to find the target words, it
is not simply guessing (student 93)
I like this test because it is enjoyable and motivating me to study more about
English and English vocabulary (student 6)
I do not know what the morphological awareness is, but after doing the test, I feel
curious and want to try another test (student 21) In addition, concerning the strategies the participants used in learning English vocabulary, none of the students wrote about learning English vocabulary by inferring the meaning from morphological knowledge (Anglin, 1993). Thus, the result of this study may suggest to the students a new method that they can use in their vocabulary learning. Finally, the responses to the survey questions show that the students organized their vocabulary learning strategies into stages (e.g. student 23 wrote Reading English
text, then finding the meaning by using dictionary and finally making notes at a board in