EWC661: PROPOSAL

A Study on Strategies to Enrich Vocabulary Among University Students.

1. INTRODUCTION

A vocabulary is a set of familiar words within a person's language. A vocabulary,

usually developed with age, serves as a useful and fundamental tool for
communication and acquiring knowledge. Acquiring an extensive vocabulary is one of
the largest challenges in learning a second language. As technology is developing at
a great speed today, the importance of knowing English language turned out to be
important in an environment where information is so crucial. Learning vocabulary is
the fundamental step to learn English language. Hence, many studies are carried out
in order to increase efficiency in vocabulary learning (Akın & Seferoğlu, 2004; Bruton,
2007; Erten & Tekin, 2008; Genç, 2004; McCarten, 2007; Moras, 2001; Newton, 2001;
Tang & Nesi, 2003). There are many strategies to enrich vocabulary among university
students such as the effect of text, audio and graphic aids in multimedia instruction,
learning by using mobile phone and flash card and learning through games.

The use of multimedia components such as visual text, spoken text, and
graphics in a Web-based self-instruction program to increase learners’ English
vocabulary learning. Past research has shown at Myungin Middle School in Seoul,
South Korea, a total of 172 middle school students (14 years of age) in five classes
participated in the study. Each individual was required to complete several testing
instruments such as a pretest, posttest, retention test, and attitude inventory. The
results lead one to conclude that an effective way to improve learning of English
vocabulary is to offer graphics that illustrate what the vocabulary means.

In spite of various studies in vocabulary learning, learners show very little effort
to deal with their problems about newly learned words (Meara, 1982). During the
lesson, teachers often tend to have an attitude to make the students deal with this
problem outside the class on their own (Baykal & Daventry, 2000).

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 A studied by Yongqi Gu Hong Kong from Institute of Education and Robert Keith
Johnson from University of Hong Kong about vocabulary learning strategies used by
Chinese university learners of English and the relationship between their strategies
and outcomes in learning English, they asked 850 sophomore non-English majors at
Beijing Normal University to complete a vocabulary learning questionnaire then
correlated replies to the questionnaire with results on a vocabulary size test and on
the College English Test (CETBAND2).

In order to learn and retain new words, learners should participate in different
task-based activities in their classroom whether it is a guessing task, a describing
exercise or conversation making. Such activities also include vocabulary games which
especially focus on helping learners develop and use words in different contexts by
making the lessons enjoyable. With the use of games, the teacher can create various
contexts in which students have to use the language to communicate, exchange
information and express their own opinions (Wright, Betteridge and Buckby, 1984).
Huang (1996: 1) comes to a conclusion that "learning through games could encourage
the operation of certain psychological and intellectual factors which could facilitate
communication heightened self-esteem, motivation and spontaneity, reinforcing
learning, improving intonation and building confidence."

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2. PROBLEM STATEMENT

To improve the quality of student daily communication, Universiti Teknologi MARA

(UiTM) students must be competent in the English language. The reality of English
has been the standard communication language in multiple type of guidance for most
of the subject. This issue is common among Malay and Bumiputera students as they
are not exposed to use English as their daily communication. Most of the educators
are not aware of naked truth that their students are unable to potentially expand as
they were afraid to communicate among each other using English language. Students
did not realize that to enhance their vocabulary skills, they need to practice more with
casual daily communication among students and lecturers. As result, they may not
expanding enough to meet the minimum qualifications to enter the industry as a
competent workers. The following are the basic question for this study :

 Why students did not adopt the correct words in communication?

 What are the better strategies to erich vocabulary for students?
 How do having better vocabulary improve students communication skills?

3. OBJECTIVES OF THE STUDY

The purpose of this study is to investigate the vocabulary ability for students in UiTM
Shah Alam. This study suggests several research objectives to be attained as follows:

a) To find out ways adopted by students in having good communication skills.

b) To investigate the level of vocabulary usage in students daily communication.
c) To tackle hesitation in using wide vocabulary availability among students.

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4. SIGNIFICANCE OF THE STUDY

The findings of this study will benefit the students from UiTM in several ways. Firstly,
the students will know what strategies to adapt for vocabulary learning. Once they start
to adapt the new alternate approach, potentially it will help them to enhance their
communication skills. However, if they already knew and adapted our new strategy,
this study will not give significant benefit to them. Lastly, we can improve the
vocabulary learning strategies applied by UiTM students.

5. LIMITATIONS OF THE STUDY

The studies are being done with several potential limitation because of limitation in
time. The result that we obtained from the survey are being recorded during the whole
seven weeks from students of UiTM Shah Alam and the results are being analyzed to
discover the strategies used for vocabulary learning. The survey is distributed
throughout applicant from UiTM Shah Alam fresh undergraduate students which is
around 30 students were involved with the conducted survey. By the whole evaluation
from the survey, the personality of student also will be evaluated to identify the
common similarity among the subjects. All the survey obtain are being analyzed and
presented in form of graph and table. Lastly, the sample size is too small and thus, the
results cannot be generalized to all UiTM students.

6. PREVIOUS STUDIES

One of the journals said vocabulary learning is often used with strategies such as word
lists or paired associations in which new words are presented with their translations.
These strategies often require learners to memorize pair associations directly (Sun &
Dong, 2004). Meara (1996) found that many researchers in vocabulary learning
studies have explored various methods of vocabulary presentation and their
corresponding effectiveness in retention. Some earlier studies found that there is a
limit to the number of words that can be learned at one time (Crothers & Suppes, 1967,
chap. 4). Rote repetition appears less efficient than using spaced recall and structured

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review (Atkinson, 1972). Then, silent repetition and silent writing are less effective than
repeating the words aloud (Meara, 1996).

Another journal said that,

7. Methodology

This study will be conducted at UiTM Shah Alam. The subject of this study will be 30
students taking any courses in at the university. In this study, the research instrument
will be used to collect the data is a questionnaire. This questionnaire will use to survey
on how well students in UiTM Shah Alam use a vocabulary. The collected data from
the questionnaire will be analysed from frequency count into percentages by using
excel and then transferred into suitable tables and charts. This study will be conducted
between September 2018 and October 2018.

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