Publication 12 16825 913

Testing Vocabulary
To produce the language in teaching vocabulary, the English teachers

must have ability to:
a. recognize it in its spoken or written form;
b. recall It at will;
c. relate it to an appropriate object or concept;
d. use it in the appropriate grammatical form;
e. in speech, pronounce it in a recognizable way;
f. In writing, spell it correctly;
g. use it at the appropriate level." (Wallace, 1982:27)
Meanwhile, Angela (1990:36) clarifies that “English teachers can apply
generative process to their students in producing language." This means
that a word is used generative if it is used in speaking activities. in other
words, English teachers can encourage generatively use by: 1) retelling
of the written input from a different focus; 2) distributing the information
that based on the target of vocabulary given, and 3) requiring students to
reconstruct what is in a text rather than repeat it.
From these points, it is obvious that English teachers should be able to
teach the English vocabulary as many as possible in order to the students
can actualize some or all of these points with the target vocabulary.
Additionally, these points enable the English teachers to cover the
language skills and the language components, such as speaking, writing,
grammar, pronunciation and spelling.
B. Vocabulary Teaching Techniques in General
If the teaching of vocabulary is related to reading comprehension, then
there are three views about the relationship between vocabulary
development and reading comprehension. The intended views are:
"The first view suggests that direct instruction make little differences in
terms of vocabulary development, whereas the second view suggests that
direct instruction in specific words is extremely beneficial. The third view
suggest that vocabulary development will be enhanced if students learn to
relate to newconcepts to their existing concepts and background
knowledge." (Nagy and Anderson, 1985 in Robert et al (1995)
From these views, it is obvious that teaching vocabulary proposed by the
English teachers should take into consideration the students' vocabulary
development during teaching-learning activity. Also, the English teachers
should able to teach unfamiliar or specific words which are adjusted to
the students’ ability when they read certain texts directly. In a nutshell,
direct instruction on new vocabularies can be taught to the students if it
focuses on relating them to the students’ background knowledge.
C. The Techniques of Teaching Vocabulary at Senior High School
Commonly, there are several techniques concerning the teaching of'
Vocabulary. However, there are a few things that have to be remembered
by the most English teachers if they want to present a new vocabulary or
the lexical items to their students. It means that the English teachers want
students to remember new vocabulary .Then, it needs to be learnt,
practiced, and revised to prevent students from forgetting.
1. Visual Techniques
Concerning with the visual techniques, Gairns and Redman(1980) as
cited by Marla, et al (1999:12) says that "there are there form visual
techniques; “relia, pictures, and mime or gestures.” Relia means using a
variety of real-object brought by the students in the classroom It can be
also applied to remember written material. Students can act out what they
read, or associate physical sensation with specific words found in reading
passages.
Referring to ideas mentioned above, Klippel (1994:115) implies that
"mime or gesture is useful if it emphasizes the importance of gestures and
facial expression on communication. At the essence it can not only be
used to indicate the meaning of a word found in reading passage, but also
in speaking activity as it stresses mostly on communication.
2. Verbal Techniques
This technique pertains to the use of illustrative situation, synonims,
opposites, scale, definition and categories. More specifically, Marla, et al
(1990:3) divide verbal techniques into four parts, among those are: ~
a. Definition and illustration sentences, this technique the English
teachers are expected to introduce a word in English through the use of
other word in the same language.
b. Synonyms and antonyms; Synonyms and antonyms are especially
important in building new vocabulary because learners are able to know
vocabulary. Synonyms are words that have the same meaning as the
unknown in a given sentence. There may be signals that identify the
presence of synonym for the readers. They could be or, commas, dashes,
and colons. Meanwhile, antonyms are words that have the opposite
meaning of the unknown word in a given sentence. Signals which
identify the presence of the antonyms for readers are instead, although,
but, yet, and however.
c. Scale; This technique is the presentation of related words in scales that
include the combination of both verbal and visual techniques, for
example, in term 32° Celsius, the degree sign is the visual. d.
Explanation; This technique explains the meaning and the use of a
foreign word in the foreign language itself.
Taking into account the points of technique presented earlier, it seems
that there are several similarities of program for teaching vocabulary
development skills to be recognized by Brown (1994:367). He offers
some techniques for teaching vocabulary skills, among other are :
1. Determine the goal of teaching, such as:
a. To improve the reading vocabulary skills of ESL students
b. To teach ESL students word-building skills
c. To teach ESL students to guess word meanings from context clues
2. Get student to make word building; that is derived from suffixes,
prefixes, and roots.
3. Definition clues, which comprises the parentheses and footnotes, and
synonyms and antonyms.
4. Inference clues; These clues have three types, such as example,

summary, and experience.
Based on the quotation above, it can be said that the English teachers,
Testing Vocabulary
The importance of testing vocabulary in language testing: Since it is a
well known fact that vocabulary has a
big importance as much as the language skills in the whole language
system, the importance of the assessment
of vocabulary is the same as the assessment of other skills. As Schmitt
(2000) states, vocabulary is an essential
building block of language and, as such it makes sense to be able to
measure learners’ knowledge of it. With
regard to second language acquisition, vocabulary is an indispensable and
basic part. Both teachers and
learners spend lots of time and energy on vocabulary acquisition. For this
reason, due to the importance of
vocabulary in the whole language system, it is quite necessary to test the
vocabulary knowledge of learners.
Why do we test?: One of the most common reasons for testing
vocabulary is to find out if the students have
covered the words they have been taught. As Read (2000) states, in the
achievement test, the vocabulary
section may be designed to assess how well the students have mastered a
vocabulary skill that they have been
taught. Moreover, vocabulary test can be utilized as a means of
motivating students to study and showing
them their progress in learning new words. Also, vocabulary tests which
are part of commercial tests, such as
TOEFL, attempt to provide a measure of learners’ vocabulary size, which
is believed to give an indication of
overall language proficiency (Schmitt, 1994).
What do we test?: A careful selection, or sampling, of lexical items for
inclusion in a test is generally a most
exciting task (Heaton, 1988). While making this selection, the test writer
should consider some aspects. The
first one is whether to test the students’ active or passive vocabulary and
whether to take the vocabulary items
from spoken or written language. When the four skills are added to these
dimensions, as Heaton (1988) states,
selection of vocabulary can be thought of falling rough divisions
according to four major language skills.
Selecting tasks are cognitively more complex than identification tasks,

since they involve
both recognising words and making choices amongst them. This may take
the form of
choosing the 'odd one out', as in this task (again, based on the lexical set
of clothes):
Choose the odd one out in each group:
1 trousers socks jeans T-shirt
2 blouse skirt tie dress
3 T-shirt suit shorts trainers
Note that with this kind of activity, there is no 'right' answer necessarily.
What is important is
that learners are able to justify their choice, whatever their answer. It is
the cognitive work that counts - not getting the right answer.
B.3. A matching task involves first recognizing words and then pairing
them with – for example - a visual representation, a translation, a
synonym, an antonym, a definition, or a collocate. As an example of this
last type, here is a verb—noun matching task:

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Testing Vocabulary

To produce the language in teaching vocabulary, the English teachers

4. Inference clues; These clues have three types, such as example,

Selecting tasks are cognitively more complex than identification tasks,

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