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