CRITICAL READING 13

REVIEW OF JOURNAL entitled ‘PROFILING THE VOCABULARY OF NEWS TEXTS AS CAPACITY BUILDING FOR LANGUAGE TEACHERS’ by Gusti Astika (2015) Universitas Kristen Satya Wacana, Salatiga, Indonesia

This paper conducted by Gusti Astika has described the challenges that the 21st century brings to language educators and the skills needed to cope with the demands of the 21st century in English language teaching. The continuous advancement of the internet technology, ICT, and digital devices has exerted its influence on the job and responsibility of language teachers. Vocabulary is one component of language learning. The conventional way of selecting and teaching vocabulary may place much teaching burden on the teachers because they have to rely on intuition to select difficult words. The ease and convenience offered by the Vocabulary Profile may help alleviate some of the teachers‟ teaching burden in selecting vocabulary items that are appropriate to the students‟ current knowledge of English. Researchers claim that vocabulary is essential and has a central role in comprehension. Development in ICT and easy access to information from the internet necessitate language teachers to have relevant knowledge and skills to utilize pedagogical tools to use authentic online materials for learning purposes. One of such a tool is the Vocabulary Profiler that can be used to categorize lexical words in a text into different frequency levels: high, low, and academic word list. This paper discusses how to use the Vocabulary Profiler to classify words in a text into the different categories. The utilization of this tool can significantly alleviate the workload of teachers in selecting vocabulary in reading text which is conventionally based on teachers‟ intuition and perception. The sample text in this paper was selected from VOA website which may not be found in the textbooks currently used at schools. The paper ends with some implication for teaching about vocabulary selection.

The output from the vocabulary profiler provides useful mapping of words in the text. One suggestion for developing students acquisition of vocabulary is to apply the principles of Task-Based Language Teaching that aims not only to develop students‟ implicit knowledge but also procedural knowledge of vocabulary through communicative task activities.