Vocabulary constraints on reading materials

Written English usually contains greater variety of lexical items than spoken conversational English. It is claimed that the condition of the words in a reading materials has a great influence on readers’ comprehension. This case study was carried out in Undergraduate Program of State University of Malang (UM). The aim of the study is to identify and describe the vocabulary in the reading materials and to seek if the text is useful for reading skill development. A descriptive qualitative design was applied to obtain the data. For this purpose, some available computer programs were used. They were used to find the description of vocabulary in the texts. It was found that the texts, containing 7,945 words of 20 different texts, are dominated by low frequency words which account for 16.97% of the words in the texts. In terms of high frequency words occurring in the texts, function words dominate the texts. In the case of word levels, it was found that the texts being used have very limited number of words from GSL (West, 1953). The proportion of the first 1,000 words of GSL only accounts for 44.6%. The data also show that the texts contain too large proportion of words which are not in the three levels (the first 2,000 and UWL). These words account for 26.44% of the running words in the texts. It is believed that the constraints are due to the selection of the texts which are made of a series of short-unrelated texts (Stahl, K. and Bravo, 2010). This kind of text is subject to the accumulation of low frequency words especially those of content words and limited of words from GSL. It could also defeat the development of students’ reading skills and vocabulary enrichment.