The impact of vocabulary selection ability on EFL students’ communication skills

Abstract

To gain proficiency in English, the students in Bali should have proficiency in the language, not only through correctly understanding and using sentence structure or vocabulary, but also by managing the flow of language in broader culture-based expressions in standardized communication. Recent studies have focused solely on the phenomenon of language proficiency, however, without considering the integrative elements of language proficiency as a learning achievement. Therefore, this study aimed to explore any causal-impact relationship between students' ability to discriminate vocabulary and their communication skills. The researcher conducted an ex post facto research design as the purpose was only to accurately see the correlation between the variables. This study involved 40 students of tenth-grade students of the SMK PGRI 3 Badung as participants using a targeted sampling technique. Data were collected by running two types of tests. Test A was used to measure students' ability to distinguish vocabulary usage in listening activities and Test B was a speaking and writing proficiency test. The data were analyzed with SPSS 25.0. The results showed that the ability to distinguish vocabulary statistically affected the clear flow of English communication, although some grammatical errors could not be ignored. The results showed that word selection ability enabled students to maintain the flow of communication better. Therefore, this study suggests that teachers adopt a teaching strategy to integrate all elements of communication for better language proficiency.