Vocabulary Learning of ‘Here’, ‘There’ and ‘Over There’ in Stories among Primary School Students

Abstract

Learning words can be difficult among certain students due to confusion of the meaning and usage especially in a large classroom. Students will get confused especially when they used to use the words at home but when they learn at school, the words have different meaning and usage. Therefore, this study focuses on the usage of ‘here’, ‘there’ and ‘over there’ using stories among primary school students in Malaysia. The samples of the study consist of six subjects from a class of Malay language. The subjects were taught the usage of the three words for three weeks by using stories in the classroom. They were allowed to show action from the stories in order to make the sentences understandable among the other students in the classroom. The stories were based on animal stories like “The Birds of Paradise” and “The Black Crow”. The sentences and action were video-taped and transcribed. The transcriptions were analysed by using assumption from Normaliza Abd Rahim [1] discourse analysis theory. The results of the study revealed that the subjects were able to use the three words by showing action from the stories. Also, the results revealed that the subjects did not create any confusion towards the meaning of the words since the rest of the students were able to imagine the birds, setting that was meant in the sentence. On the other hand, the subjects were able to relate to the stories that they knew with the words “here”, “there” and “over there”. It is hoped that further studies will focus on the usage of other vocabulary in order to avoid confusion among students in the classroom.
Keywords- second language learners; vocabulary; Malay language; assumption