CHAPTER II
LITERATURE REVIEW
In this chapter, we describe (1) the concept of learning words, (2) the concept of spelling words, and (3) the concept of memorizing words.
2.1 The Concept of Learning Words
The word “Learning words” means a cyclical process of meeting new words and initial learning, followed by meeting those words again and again, each time extending knowledge of what the words mean and how they are used in the foreign language. Vygotsky (1962 ) ; Wertsch (1985) states that althought children may use the same words as adults, they may not hold the same meanings for those words.
In addition, Paul Bloom. (2000) stated that Normal children learn tens of thousands of words, and do so quickly and efficiently, often in highly impoverished environments. Instead of a sudden transition in word learning, children might reach this point of word learning as the result of a gradual increase in rate. Jeffrey Elman and his colleagues (1996) suggest that this is what happens in normal development: the pace of vocabulary development exhibits a gradual linear increase.
The teacher has important role in teaching their students. The teacher should have their own technique to make the students were interested learning with him or her. Jamie McKenzie's article “The WIRED Classroom” provides a list of descriptors of the role of a teacher who is a Guide on the Side while students are conducting their investigations. "... the teacher is circulating, redirecting, disciplining, questioning, assessing, guiding, directing, fascinating, validating, facilitating, moving, monitoring, challenging, motivating, watching, moderating, diagnosing, trouble-shooting, observing, encouraging, suggesting, watching, modeling and clarifying." In other words, the teacher has to have some teaching strategies or techniques that are relevant to the learners’ interest and curriculum. Nowadays, the learners spelling suitable with the situation with situation and the atmosphere in the classroom.
Learning is acquiring new knowledge, behaviors, skills, values, preferences or understanding, and may involve synthesizing different types of information. The ability to learn is possessed by humans, animals and some machines. Progress over time tends to follow learning curves. The usage of all four sensory channel of the brain (hearing, saying, writing, and seeing) is a vital order to prevent the tendency the major handicap of reading and writing.
2.1.1 Good Learner
According to responses from UO GTFs and faculty, “a good learner” is someone who analyzes new information and contrasts it with what they already know, doesn't just study for an exam or for a grade, aware of when they don't understand and able to communicate that to the teacher, and remembers to do the homework and asks for help when they don't understand. The habit can be made by practicing, the learners must practise their ability many times. Learning takes much more effort, and calls for motivation, commitment, time management, and good learning skills.
Most important is, the children are considered adults and are expected to be responsible for their own learning. "to understand and help students achieve the many traits characteristic of a self-directed learner, we must examine the disciplines of motivational psychology and educational psychology. Teachers, parents, administrators, and students must understand the concepts of student motivation, metacognition, self-efficacy, self-regulation, locus of control, and goal orientation. These concepts provide the foundation for a student seeking to become a self-directed learner. Although a student can become a self-directed learner without explicit instruction and development of these traits, it is more likely to occur when teachers and administrators understand and foster them at the classroom or school level (Lumsden, 1999; Renchler, 1992; Biemiller & Meichenbaum, 1992)."
2.1.2 Poor Learner
In contrast with good learners, poor learners usually never to analyzed new information and contrast it with what they already know. They usually do not take much more effort, and calls for motivation, commitment, and time management. Poor learners usually depend on what their friends did first and sometimes they just copied the things that they have made.
2.2 The concept of Spelling Words
The word “Spelling” means the forming words, letters in both written and oral forms. According to Wikianswer.com, “Spelling” is the arrangement of letters to form language words. In most cases, a given language will settle on a particular spelling for a given word. The correct spelling will enable readers to properly distinguish the word and interpret its meaning. With the advent of word processing programs containing grammar and spell check features, students are often failing to learn and master important skills. Today's students must not allow themselves to become over-reliant on the available technologies. Students should first understand the underlying rules that these technologies use, before using them as writing and spelling aids.
When teaching spelling conventions, teachers need to: strike a balance between explaining spelling patterns and conventions, and building on pupils' existing knowledge and strike a balance between recognising patterns and conventions, and acknowledging exceptions.
2.2.1 Nature of Evaluation
In our daily life, we always engaged in evaluation to judge a person as friendly or unfriendly. Evaluation considers the programs as successful or unsuccessful and so on. Human beings have always been placed in a situation where it is necessary to determine the value if thing in professional activity. Evaluation is mainly a proccess, which is done to preparation getting, forming judgement and using it in decision making and repoting the evaluation result.
Evaluation is a tool to measure whether the student understand the materials or not. In this case, the students have the uncompleted sentences and then they write down the missing words that are dictated by the teacher.
In conclusion, Evaluation is a process which is done preparation, to get information of the student‘s knowledge, and measure whether the students understand the material or not.
2.2.2 Kinds of Dictation and Evaluation
A. Dictation
According to Sawyer and Silver (1961) define four types of dictation that can be used in language learning. There are phonemic item dictation, phonemic text dictation, orthographic item dictation, and orthographic text dictation. Phonemic item dictation consists of the teacher presenting the individual sounds of a language. The phonemic item dictation is useful in that it increases the students' ability to recognize the sounds of a language and their contrasts, thereby facilitating their accurate production. Phonemic text dictation is an extension of the phonemic item dictation. It consists of the teacher reciting a passage which students phonetically transcribe.
The phonemic item dictation is valuable as a way to understand how English sounds change in connected speech. Orthographic item dictation is the dictating of individual words in isolation for transcription, similar to the traditional spelling test. It is useful for reinforcing the correlation between the spelling system and sound system of a language. Orthographic text dictation is the classic dictation exercise all foreign language teachers are familiar with. Besides reinforcing the spelling/sound correlation of English, the orthographic text dictation uncovers comprehension and grammatical weaknesses in learners which the teacher can analyze and address in future lessons.
B. Evaluation
According to Robert S. Randall, there are four kinds of Evaluation called context evaluation, design evaluation, process evaluation, and product evaluation. Context evaluation is consisting of planning decisions and context information that serves them. Design evaluation entails structuring the decisions which depends on design information. Process evaluation is the information that needed and entails not only evidence about effectiveness in attaining short and long range goals. Last is Product evaluation. This is consisting of evidence needed to determine effectiveness in attaining the objectives and other information about how the text is being conducted.
2.2.3 The advantages of dictation
Dictation can help students to diagnose and correct these kinds of errors as well as others . If done systematically and regularly, dictation exercises improve students’ ability to distinguish sounds in continuous speech as well as improving their spelling and their recognition of grammatically correct sentences and their production of them. Davis and Rinvolucri write that "Decoding the sounds of [English] and recoding them in writing is a major learning task" (1988). Dictation gives students practice in comprehending and transcribing clear English prose. This is important because we have all encountered awkward sentences in textbooks that are not good models of English writing, or raise grammatical, syntactic, or semantic questions that are not the point of the exercise to begin with.
According to Ayman Abou Karoum, dictation gives some advantages to the teacher and the student. The advantages include :
1. Dictation can help develop all four language skills in an integrative way.
2. As students develop their aural comprehension of meaning and also of the relationship among segments of language, they are learning grammar.
3. Dictation helps to develop short-term memory. Students practice retaining meaningful phrases or whole sentences before writing them down.
4. Practice in careful listening to dictation will be useful later on in note taking exercises.
5. Correcting dictation can lead to oral communication.
6. If the students do well, dictation is motivating.
7. Dictation involves the whole class, no matter how large it is.
8. During and after the dictation, all the students are active.
9. Correction can be done by the students.
10. Dictation can be prepared for mixed ability groups.
11. The students, as well as the teacher, can get instant feedback (if the exercise is corrected immediately).
12. The dictation passage can (and should) be completely prepared in advance. (It can also be taped.)
13. Dictation can be administered quite effectively by an inexperienced teacher.
14. While dictating, the teacher can move about, giving individual attention.
15. If a meaningful text is to be given for the students, it would be a good opportunity for the teacher to construct one that revises the spelling rules and the vocabulary words taught.
2.2.4 The disadvantages of dictation
Dictation is time wasting activity, not an exercise based on recognizable language use. The students are given sample example time in which to consider the meaning of what they hear before they write, and they can listen again as the text is repeated. This does not reflect authentic language use ( Lado in Prodromou 1983 : 37 ) cited in Meriani ( 2001 :3 ). One problem the need to be addressed is the perception that students may have doing a dictation activity. Some students and teacher may have developed a version in dictation. It is important, therefore to ensure that we vary the ways that we do in dictation in class and encourage the students to focus on meaning as well as accuracy.
A second common problem is that some students may find it more difficult than others, especially if you’re teaching multi-level class. One way of combating this, is to think about how much of the dictation we expect our students to produce. Incidentally, this can be a useful approach for practicing specific parts of speech example. All of students can be required to listen for only the prepositions or articles needed to fill in the gaps. Students often aren’t very good looking for mistakes in what they have written when comparing it to the original text. It can be often easier to check the errors in someone else’s text rather in our own. Also, it might be an idea to leave some time between completing and checking the text against a correct
2.3 The concept of memorizing words.
The biggest challenge when studying vocabulary is to actually remember the words you just learned. Some words seem to stick to your memory immediately whereas you seem to always forget others. There are several ways to improve your memory when learning foreign language vocabulary. None is foolproof and all require some work, but with those tips you will be able to learn more efficiently. When meeting a new word, you need to make it stick to its meaning in your mind. You can picture your memory as a giant Christmas trees, with many branches representing each a part of your memory. To remember a new word, you need to hang it on a branch, existing or newly created. It is extremely difficult to remember more than a few new words when they are totally out of the blue and not tied in any way to something else that is already in your memory. Fortunately, there are many ways to tie a new word to something in your memory:
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