A Study of Grade Six Students' Difficulties in Learning English Vocabulary in Wangduephodrang District Bhutan

Abstract

Vocabulary is the fundamental understanding of a language that determines the quality of a learner's speaking, listening, reading, and writing. Students can readily understand the material presented by the teacher if they have mastered vocabulary. Language skills are built on a foundation of vocabulary. It is difficult to achieve any level of language fluency without understanding the vocabulary. Despite the fact that vocabulary is the foundation for learning a second language, there has been little or no research done in Bhutan. To close this gap, this study assesses the challenges that sixth-grade students in Wangduephodrang district experience in learning English vocabulary and to suggest techniques for reducing students' difficulties in acquiring English vocabulary. This study used a questionnaire to survey problems and obstacles found by the grade six students who studied English. The questionnaire consists of eight questions and the students were instructed to complete it by rating their problems accordingly. The questions assessed the participants difficulties in the learning vocabulary on a five-point Likert scales. As a result, the questions were tabulated and for the numerical interpretation of data, frequency and percentage were used to indicate their extent of agreement. The research was carried out in Wangduephodrang district of Bhutan for a duration of one year. This quantitative study uses a questionnaire, as an instrument, to collect the data. The participants were 312 students in grades six from a variety of schools in the academic year 2021. Simple random sampling was used to select the participants. The findings show that students in grade six have a variety of difficulties learning vocabulary, including understanding the meanings of new words, pronouncing new words correctly, recalling and writing new vocabulary. The students' difficulties stemmed from the fact that English is still a foreign language in their environments.