The Students' Strategies in Learning Vocabulary of The X Year Students' at Boarding School at Aceh Besar

Vocabulary is one of the language aspects that must be learned by the foreign language learners. Vocabulary knowledge is often viewed as a critical tool for foreign language learners because limited vocabulary in learning a foreign language make the student’s barrier in communication. Students will find difficulties in learning English if they do not know strategies in learning vocabulary. The research purposes were: 1) To find out the students’ strategies in learning vocabulary in various boarding schools, and 2) To find out the dominant strategies used by senior high school of the X year students in various boarding schools. In this study the writer used descriptive qualitative design. The population of this study was the students of MAS Oemardiyan, MAS Al-Manar, MAS RIAB consisting of 74 students. In collecting the data, the writer used open questionnaire as instrument. The result of the data showed that many students employed more than one strategies in learning vocabulary. Those strategies were using determination strategies, social strategies, memory strategies, cognitive strategies and metacognitive strategies. The most dominant strategy was determination strategies. In this strategy, students try to guess and discover the meaning of the new words with the help of context, structural knowledge and reference material. That means students find the meaning of the words on their own.