Abstract:
The main purpose of the study was to investigate the English vocabulary knowledge of the first year students in an Indonesian university. A sample of 324 students were randomly selected by a stratified sampling method from a total of 1447 first year students of Lampung University. The subjects completed two tests: a translation test, which was to estimate their breadth of knowledge of the most frequent English words, and a word associates test, which was to measure their depth of knowledge of a sub-set of the words. A sub-sample of 39 students were also given an interview, which was intended to provide evidence of the validity of the translation and word associates tests.
The translation test contained 200 target words, which were sampled from the 2000 most frequent English words (West, 1953) and the 808-item university word list (Xue & Nation, 1984). The word associates test, and the interview were based on 50 of the same target words that were used in the translation test. All of the tests were highly reliable, with reliability coefficients of 0.98 for the translation and interview, and 0.96 for the word associates test. The translation and word associates tests, which were taken by the whole sample of students, were moderately correlated. When the results of the interview sub-sample were intercorrelated, a very high correlation was found between the interview and the translation test, whereas the word associates test was not so strongly related to the other two.
The results of the translation test show that the students knew about 1226 of the words in the three lists on average. When the vocabulary knowledge of the students was broken down by list, the students knew 647, 339, and 239 words in the first thousand, second thousand, and university wordlists respectively. There was great variation in the level of vocabulary knowledge among the total student sample and also significant differences between the students in the seven faculties of the university.
Based on the results of the word associates test the students did not know a selection of words from the three lists well. Again there were significant differences in performance according to faculty, and also on the basis of the students' senior high school specialization.
The results of this study indicate that the students' vocabulary knowledge was still too limited to cope with the vocabulary in the academic texts that they needed to read in their university courses. This suggests that these students were likely to encounter many unknown words and so they would find the texts frustrating to read.
