Investigating the effects of word pairs on word knowledge

Abstract

Vocabulary plays an essential role in language learning. The lack of vocabulary might cause incompetency to language users. Therefore, it is 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 these aspects of word knowledge. The purpose of this study is to investigate the effects of word pairs in learning word knowledge. The researcher is interested to find out which aspects of word knowledge are gained by learning from Malay Translation, English Translation, Malay Definition and English Definition word pairs. One hundred twenty secondary school students were divided into four groups of 30 students and each group was given a set of word pair to learn. After they have learned the word pairs, they were asked to answer word knowledge tests. Data was analysed using SPSS software and the results for each word pair were compared. 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 Malay Definition word pair scored the highest mean percentage, 90.4 percent, followed by the Malay Translation word pair, 84.9 percent, the English Translation word pair, 83.1 percent, and English Definition word pair, 69.8 percent