English Language Acquisition (A Case Study of A Young Learner)

Abstract

This study aims at finding the English vocabulary acquired by a young learner from cartoon movies and describing how she understands the meanings. This is a case study of a five-year-old young learner, who likes story-telling, in which she initially gets the English vocabulary, which is not her first language, from watching cartoon movies. The process of acquiring the vocabulary happens since she was two years old until now. Observation method was used in collecting the data in her age of 4-5 years, as well as interviewing her parents in order to get the information regarding how the child understands the meanings of the vocabulary. Language acquisition (Jalongo: 1992), and vocabulary understanding method (Dardjowidjojo: 2012) were used as the theoretical framework in analysing the data. The results show that the young learner acquires more than seven vocabulary from one cartoon movie in the forms of noun, verb, adjective, and adverb, besides that, she is also able to acquire phrases and sentences. The child mostly used referential strategy to understand the meanings of the vocabulary she got from the cartoon movies. Her parents also play the important role in assisting and helping the child to understand the vocabulary meanings by translating the words into her mother tongue and by describing the difficult vocabulary she could not understand.