Vocabulary acquisition of a selected elementary school students in Surabaya.

According to Krashen (1989) the other way to improving the language acquisition competence is input hypotheses. Children do not obtain the language rules by chance in their natural situation but also learn it intentionally from the teaching learning process in the school or outside the school. In elementary school, the acquisition occurs in the classroom. The teacher exposes her teaching materials and tries to speak English to her students in English. In Indonesia, a big potential acquisition occurs in the classroom. Therefore, the writer will do this research in the classroom about acquisition. This study focused on the subjects' content word acquisition. The research design is cross sectional study, which is done at one specific point in time for collecting the data. This research is to measure the students' vocabulary that has been exposed by the teacher since in the 1" until :F grade of elementary school. The subject of this study was second grade of elementary school students. The instrument of this study was vocabulary test. The study revealed that the subjects have acquired the three word classes of content words: noun (28%), verb (12%), and adjective (14%). These results show that the content words acquired the most by the subjects are noun while verb an adjective in the second position. From the conclusion above, most of the content words acquired by the subjects was nouns. As can be seen, the subjects who are the young learners, nouns seem to be easier to acquire. It is easier for the subject to see, find, and imagine the things that the nouns refer to. Children prefer to use and understand concrete terms than abstract terms