Shamsudin, Sarimah and Lateh, Nor Hazwani Munirah and Attan, Anie
(2016)
Relationship Between Vocabulary Size And MUET Score Of Malaysian ESL Undergraduates.
In:
4th International Conference on Liberal Arts and Social Sciences 2016 (ICOLASS’16).
Universiti Sains Malaysia, p. 12.
Abstract
Vocabulary is an important element of a language. Without the knowledge of vocabulary, people will not
be able to understand what others are saying to them. Furthermore, they will also experience difficulty
expressing what they intend to say or write. Taking this into account, language learners are required to
achieve a certain attainment of vocabulary size of a target language to ensure they are able to meet the
demands of the language and achieve maximum comprehension when the language is used in
communication. As such, it is very important for language learners to be aware of their vocabulary size
of the target language. To this end, the current study was conducted to identify the English vocabulary
size of first year undergraduate students in a Malaysian public university. In addition, it aims to examine
whether there is a correlation between the scores which the students obtained for their Malaysian
University English Test (MUET) and their total English vocabulary size. An intact group of thirty first year
students (19 female, 11 male) who use English as their second language participated in the study. The
Vocabulary Size Test (VST) by Nation and Beglar (2007) was administered to gauge their English
vocabulary size and a questionnaire was used to elicit demographic details. The findings revealed that
majority of the participants have below than 4000 English vocabulary size. The mean score of the
participants’ English vocabulary size is 3183 word families indicating that the participants on average do
not reach the vocabulary size of 6000 to 9000 word families to achieve 98% coverage in written and
spoken English texts (Nation, 2006). Their minimum English vocabulary size is 2200 whereas the
maximum is 4500 word families. A strong positive correlation of r=0.84 was found with regard to the
relationship between the participants’ MUET score and their English vocabulary size. This result
suggests that the better the participants’ score in MUET, the more English vocabulary they would have.
This result could also mean that the larger the English vocabulary size of the participants, the higher
their MUET score is.
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