Examining the Vocabulary Levels of Indonesia’s English National Examination Texts
Title
Examining the Vocabulary Levels of Indonesia s English National Examination Texts
Examining the Vocabulary Levels of Indonesia s English National Examination Texts
Keywords: Junior and senior high schools, National Examination, corpus, vocabulary levels, AW
Authors
Furqanul Aziez
Muhammadiyah University of Purwokerto, Indonesia
Furqanul Aziez
Muhammadiyah University of Purwokerto, Indonesia
Bio Data
Furqanul Aziez is a lecturer at Muhammadiyah University of Purwokerto, Indonesia.He has been teaching for the university for twenty one years. He mostly teaches on BA and MA courses in Lexical Study, Language Testing, and Innovations in Education. His main research interests include vocabulary, TEFL, and language testing.
Abstract
This study is designed to create a corpus of junior high school (JHS) and senior high school (SHS) English National Examination (NE) texts used in Indonesia throughout four years of administration to form the basis of analysis. By means of corpus analysis, it sought to find out the vocabulary levels of junior and senior high school English NE texts (distribution among the K1 K20 vocabulary levels, where K refers to the one-thousand- word band in the word frequency list), the number of interdisciplinary academic words the texts contain, and the number of words beyond the 2,000 high frequency English words the texts hold. Research results show that while JHS students are presumed to have lower English proficiency NE vocabulary of the level indicates the opposite. Though both JHS and SHS NE texts belong to the same K4 (4,000-word) level (the number of words required for the 95% comprehension of these texts), the 4,000 words cover only 95.80% of the running words in JHS NE texts and 95.96% of that of SHS NE texts. With regard to the words beyond the 2,000 basic words, the coverage in JHS NE texts is 7.83% compared to that in SHS NE texts, which is only 7.61%. However, SHS NE texts contain more interdisciplinary academic words in Coxhead s AWL, where they contain 3.85% while the JHS NE texts contain 2.47% of the tokens in the texts.
This study is designed to create a corpus of junior high school (JHS) and senior high school (SHS) English National Examination (NE) texts used in Indonesia throughout four years of administration to form the basis of analysis. By means of corpus analysis, it sought to find out the vocabulary levels of junior and senior high school English NE texts (distribution among the K1 K20 vocabulary levels, where K refers to the one-thousand- word band in the word frequency list), the number of interdisciplinary academic words the texts contain, and the number of words beyond the 2,000 high frequency English words the texts hold. Research results show that while JHS students are presumed to have lower English proficiency NE vocabulary of the level indicates the opposite. Though both JHS and SHS NE texts belong to the same K4 (4,000-word) level (the number of words required for the 95% comprehension of these texts), the 4,000 words cover only 95.80% of the running words in JHS NE texts and 95.96% of that of SHS NE texts. With regard to the words beyond the 2,000 basic words, the coverage in JHS NE texts is 7.83% compared to that in SHS NE texts, which is only 7.61%. However, SHS NE texts contain more interdisciplinary academic words in Coxhead s AWL, where they contain 3.85% while the JHS NE texts contain 2.47% of the tokens in the texts.
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Category: Monthly Editions, Volume 51
