Comparing the Vocabulary Levels of Indonesia’s Junior High School English Textbooks and National Examination Texts

Author:

Furqanul Aziez

Bio:

Furqanul Aziez is a lecturer at Muhammadiyah University of Purwokerto, Indonesia. He has been teaching for the university for twenty one years. He mostly teaches on BA and MA courses in Lexical Study, Language Testing, and Innovations in Education. His main research interests include vocabulary, TEFL, and language testing.

Abstract

This study attempts at creating a corpus of junior high school English textbooks (JHS TB) and national examination (JHS NE) texts. Through the corpus analysis, it seeks to find out the vocabulary levels of JHS TB and NE texts (distribution among the K1 – K20 vocabulary levels), the number of interdisciplinary academic words the texts contain, and the number of words beyond the 1,000 high frequency English words the texts hold. Research results show that while JHS students’ English proficiency is presumed to belong to elementary level the vocabulary of JHS TB is in between K3 – K4 level (3,000 – 4,000-word, the number of words required for the 95% comprehension of these texts) and the vocabulary of NE texts is in K4 (4,000-word) level. With regards to the words beyond the 1,000 basic words (the approximate number of words the student at this level are assumed to know), the coverage in JHS TB texts is 82.58% (the percentage of words in the textbooks which belong to the 1,000 basic word list) compared to JHS NE texts which is 80.09%. In terms of interdisciplinary academic words, JHS TB texts supply the students with 265 word families in Coxhead’s AWL.  This number accounts for 1.38% of the total words in the texts. This number falls short of the coverage of AWL words in JHS NE texts which reaches 2.47%.

Key words: Junior and senior high schools, Textbooks, National Examination, corpus,  vocabulary levels, AWL

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