Page 205 - Jurnal Kurikulum BPK 2020

Majority of the participants (i.e. 123) obtained Band 3 while only 9 obtained Band 5 in
the MUET. Table 1 presents the frequencies and percentages of participants for each Band.
None of the participants selected had obtained Band 6 or Band 1 in the MUET.

Table 1.
Number of Participants for each MUET band

MUET band No. of Participants Percentage
2 23 10.4
3 123 55.7
4 66 29.9
5 9 4.1
Total 221 100.00

Procedures

The students were randomly picked from the name list given. The students selected were
then grouped randomly in a counter balanced order within a single session of 90 minutes. The
orders in this study are: 115 students sat for Word Associations test (WAT) followed by
Vocabulary Size test (VST) while 115 students sat for the Vocabulary Size test (VST) followed
by Word Associations test (WAT). The time allocated for the WAT was 30 minutes and for the
VST, it was 60 minutes. Both the tests were administered to the students in single testing
sessions.

Instruments

MUET Reading Comprehension
The MUET is a standardized test of English proficiency for pre-university students
administered by the Malaysian Examinations Council. Reading component has the highest
weighting with a maximum score of 120 out of a possible 300 for the entire test.

Word Associates Test (WAT)
This is a well-established test of VD which was designed by Read in 1998. The WAT
has been widely used to measure three aspects of word knowledge in VD, namely, word
associations, semantics and collocational relationships (e.g. (Mehrpour et al., 2011; Moinzadeh
& Moslehpour, 2012; Qian, 1999, 2002; Tengku Shahraniza Tengku Abdul Jalal et al., 2015;
Wang, 2014). Meanwhile, there is no test that could measure every aspect of word knowledge
(Pignot-shahov, 2012).

Vocabulary Size Test (VST)
The Vocabulary Size Test (VST) is chosen because it is used to measure participants’
overall vocabulary size (breadth of vocabulary knowledge). In 2010, Beglar conducted a Rasch-
based validation of the monolingual test and found that the test can be used with learners from
a wide range of proficiency levels.

196