The vocabulary level of standard three and four pupils of Kakamega District
Abstract
Prior to this study, there has been no research
done in Kenya to determine the range of children S
vocabulary in English at any given level, to enable
the educators to choose or to write books of the
correct level of difficulty based on empirical
evidence from research. The aim of this study was
to find out the approximate English reading vocabulary
level of the standard three and four pupils of
Kakamega District; and to compare this with the
vocabulary level of their English class texts.
The Thorndike (1, 1944) word list was used to
measure the pupil1s vocabulary level. A pilot study
revealed that the maximum vocabulary level encountered
in any pupil was around two thousand words and this
therefore was the range of words that was used for
the final test 'C I (See Appendix A(iii).
The results show that the majority of the pupils
have a vocabulary level that is below one thousand
words. It was also found that the nursery educational
background had a positive effect on the boys, while it
appears to have no significant effect on most groups
of girls as far as vocabulary range was concerned.
In fact, nursery educational background appears to
have a negative effect on the urban girls.
When 'harder' words (arbitrarily defined as
words beyond the commonest five hundred) were sampled
from the three textbooks used by the two classes, it
was found at fifty nine per cent of the four hundred
and fifteen 'harder' words sampled for further analysis
were beyond the two thousand word level. This shows
that most of the pupils would-understand less than
half (forty one per cent) of the 'harder vocabulary
items in their class texts
Citation
M.ED ThesisSponsorhip
University of NairobiPublisher
Facult of Education, University of Nairobi
Description
Master of Education Thesis
Collections
- Faculty of Education (FEd) [5964]