Teaching and learning English, in present, focuses on promoting students’ English proficiency. English teachers generally start their teaching with English vocabulary lessons, followed by reading and then grammar. So learning vocabulary is viewed a crucial element that leads to linguistic acquisition on sentence level that can later generate the student’s understanding of English structures. There are some scholars mentioning the importance of learning vocabulary such as Allen and Vallette (1977) They mentioned the importance of vocabulary that knowing meanings of vocabulary. can build students’ confidence for communication in various situations. If students do not know enough vocabulary, they will probably face lots of difficulties in communicating and learning English. As Thornbury(2002) stated that if students do not know English grammar, students could possibly be able to slightly communicate .On the other hand, if the students do not have vocabulary knowledge, they will not be able to communicate. Thus, vocabulary is considered a very important element to all skills. Knowing vocabulary helps the students understand the meanings of words, which lead to their fluent skills in speaking, listening, reading and writing,that are beneficial to communication and English learning.
As mentioned above, it can be seen that English has crucial role to the way people, in society, communicate using this language, not only students who are in English for International Communication (EIC), but also those who are not EIC. Researchers view that non-EIC students often have some problems with vocabulary learning such as they encounter vocabulary deficiency, they cannot remember vocabulary learned, and they have short-term memories on vocabulary. These difficulties result from the problem that the students seldom learn and use English in their everyday lives. So, if they want to be successful in vocabulary learning, they have to employ strategies to help learning it. These are the strategies used to achieve vocabulary knowledge: Vocabulary learning strategies to discover the meaning of new vocabulary Items, Vocabulary Learning Strategies to Retain the Knowledge of Newly-Learned Vocabulary Items and Vocabulary Learning Strategies to Expand the Knowledge of Vocabulary. Therefore, vocabulary learning strategies are very important to how the students acquire vocabulary because these strategies are enable the students to select a proper way to gain meanings of vocabulary precisely and quickly and to improve their vocabulary literacy. Consequently, the researchers need to study that whether the students know vocabulary learning strategies that help develop their vocabulary competence.