Students’ View on Rich Vocabulary Instruction For Reading Comprehension: A Study at Banyubiru Junior High School 1

As one of academic skills, reading is considered important in education world. For students, mastering reading skills is beneficial to achieve academic goal as it allows them to receive knowledge to achieve that goal. However, in the process of comprehending texts, students sometime are faced with problems of unfamiliar words, especially when they read texts in foreign language. Later, these problems result in students’ difficulty to achieve comprehension of text content. To deal with this problem, Nation (2008) proposed a teaching instruction called Rich Vocabulary Instruction that can be used by teachers to assist student in achieving comprehension in reading. This study sets a purpose to seek what aspect of rich vocabulary instruction are taught in reading class and how the students view the advantages and disadvantages of the aspects toward their reading comprehension. To answer these questions a number of 54 students at Banyubiru Junior High School 1 in Central Java were involved as participants. Moreover, the data was collected by using instruments like class observation, questionnaire, and interview. The result of this study shows 4 aspects of rich vocabulary instruction (spoken, concept-referent, association, grammar function) that help students’ comprehension in reading. However, some discussions of these aspects were found difficult to understand due to some weakness in students’ ability and teaching techniques