CHAPTER 6
Conclusion
6.1. Summary of the Study
To sum up, the current study investigated the vocabulary size of the senior high
school students in Indonesia, the nature of their morphological awareness and the relation
of morphological awareness to building the learners’ English vocabulary. The findings
revealed that the students had better performance at the 2000 level of Nation’s
Vocabulary Levels Test, than at the higher levels. The one-way ANOVA test confirmed
that there is no significant difference in the performance of the students from the Social
Science and Natural Science programs in doing the VLT. However, the correlations
between the VLT and the two aspects of the morphological awareness tasks may be a
significant predictor of the vocabulary knowledge for senior high school students. The
results of the Morpheme Identification measure approach the ceiling. The results of the
students from the Natural Science program were significantly better than the Social
Science students in the Morphological Structure test, which was confirmed by the
Independent group t-tests done. In addition, the current study also found that there was a
significant association between morphological awareness and vocabulary size. Finally,
the participants wrote about the methods they used to develop their vocabulary. Also,
they indicated their interest in building morphological knowledge and applying it to their
English vocabulary learning.
44
6.2. Pedagogical Implications
The findings for the first question indicated a need to give more attention to the
building and development of English vocabulary for EFL senior high school students in
Indonesia. Next, the findings on the morphological awareness tasks revealed the aspects
of morphological knowledge that may contribute to vocabulary learning. This suggests
teachers should introduce aspects of morphological knowledge to the students. Initially,
teacher should give explicit instruction and then gradually the learners can apply their
morphological awareness automatically when faced with new vocabulary that has the
possibility of morphological analysis. Finally, the significant correlation of
morphological awareness to vocabulary size may suggest the need to apply this strategy
for English vocabulary learning for the students. In addition, the students themselves
confirmed their interest to use this method in their learning. Therefore, the concept of
using morphological knowledge as a vocabulary-building tool is necessary for inclusion
in the curriculum.
6.3. Limitations of the Study and Suggestions for Further Research
The current study revealed some insightful findings in and for the development of
English vocabulary learning in Indonesia, however, there are also weaknesses that should
be looked at for future study. The main problem was the appearance of the ceiling effect
in the results of the Morpheme Identification task that limited the reliability of that test.
This problem might occur because of some modifications to the test from the original
study. In the previous study by Chang et al., (2005), a problem arose because the test was
done through oral presentation. This meant it could not solely test morphological
45
awareness, as, due to the oral presentation, phonological awareness was a factor too.
Therefore, for the current study, the researcher modified the test by presenting the
scenarios in written form and by using pictures. Unfortunately, there were only five
questions developed due to the limited time for preparing the test items. Also, the lack of
time meant no trial of the test took place.
The school chosen for this study may not represent all schools in Indonesia. The
performance scores obtained by the students may have been different if the participants
were chosen from other schools, for example public senior high schools. The participants
in the current study use a different curriculum, and also differ in the number of lessons
taught compared with public schools. They have Islamic curriculum, therefore, they have
more lessons on religious subjects, for example Arabic, which may influence their
language learning, too. The results of the participants in this study may also differ from
those of other students because of their environment. They live in a rural area that may
limit them to have access to English in their surroundings. The result could be very
different if the participants were from schools in big cities in Indonesia.
Finally, future studies should focus on controlling for previous vocabulary
knowledge, ensuring that the test results are based on morphological analysis rather than
the ability to memorize vocabulary. In addition, it is necessary to focus on the five
separate components of morphological knowledge more systematically, for example, by
clearly dividing the morphological awareness task into separate sections covering root
words, inflected words, derived words, literal compounds and idioms. This separation
will show whether participants can perform equally for each part and hopefully these
modifications will give a truer result.
46
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