The investigation of 8th grade students' English vocabulary acquisition level in coursebooks

The aim of this research is to examine 8th grade students' acquirement levels of the words in 6th 7th and 8th class English Coursebook given by National Ministry of Education. In the research the importance of foreign language teaching, foreign language education and success in Turkey, the effect of factors about English success were examined separately by scanning the domestic and foreign sources on the subject. The study population is 2396 8th grade students in 22 government secondary schools in the city centre of Düzce. In selecting the sample to represent the universe the students in the population is listed and the most confidential method "simple random sampling" is used. By the draw method 119 male 217 female totally 336 students are selected from 22 secondary school. Acquisition vocabulary in the English course books given by National Ministry of Education was taken and checked in the New General Service List and words in the top 1000 were selected. 60 questions were composed from these words. Analyses of the test were done and appropriate questions were chosen according to difficulty and distinctiveness index and an achievement test of 40 questions was prepared. The English Achievement Test prepared by the researcher and a Likert type attitude scale with 5 choices of 27 items was applied by the researcher. In the analysis of data obtained from the results statistical software package was used. In the result of the research it is observed that students have medium level achievement score and attitude towards English and there are significant difference between attitude towards English and English achievement level in favor of females. In addition, a positive significant correlation between attitudes and achievement in English (rho = 0.469, p<0.01) was identified. Keywords: English, foreign language education, academic achievement, age, gender, attitudes, vocabulary achievement.