The Effects of Learning from Word Pairs on Word Knowledge

¹ Language Academy, Universiti Teknologi Malaysia, KL Campus, Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia
² Sekolah Kebangsaan Pendidikan Khas Johor Bahru (Special Education Primary School) Johor Bahru, Malaysia

Abstract

Vocabulary plays an essential role in language learning. The lack of vocabulary might cause incompetency to language users. It is therefore very important for language instructors to find suitable ways of teaching vocabulary since learning vocabulary consists of learning various aspects of word knowledge. These aspects include orthography, meaning and form, collocation, association and grammatical functions. There are various methods that could be used in gaining aspects of word knowledge. The purpose of this study is to investigate to what extent are aspects of word knowledge gained by learning from word pairs. 120 secondary school students were divided into four groups of thirty students. The first group was given a set of Malay Translation, the second, English Translation, the third, Malay Definition and the fourth, English Definition word pair to learn followed by word knowledge tests. The results show that all word pairs promote large gains in learning aspects of word knowledge. The scores between the groups were also compared and it was found that the mean score of the Malay Definition word pair group is the highest, followed by the Malay Translation word pair group, the English Translation word pair group, and English Definition word pair group.