According to Grains and Redman (1986), there are two kinds of vocabulary. They are active and passive vocabulary. Active vocabulary is used in oral and written expression by the students. While the passive vocabulary is used by the person who has ability to active produce their own speech and writing is called he has active language knowledge. The words that students recognize and understand when they occur in a context or students need someone to say something that help them recall the word meaning is called passive vocabulary. The person who has ability to understand the speech and writing of other people means he has passive knowledge. The students of elementary school have the passive vocabulary knowledge. The students of the third grade of this research understand the vocabulary of things in the kitchen. They wished to master; the understanding of the meaning of each word, the students know and are able to mention the function of the words, the understanding of the passage, and the arrangement of the jumbled word.
According to Djalinus Syah and Azimar Enang (1980: p.1) states that vocabulary is divided into two kinds, namely: general vocabulary and special vocabulary. The general vocabulary of the words that are used in general: that is no limited of field or user. Whereas special vocabulary is that the words are used in certain fields or job, profession or special science. Vocabulary knowledge concerns with word and meaning as the basic elements of vocabulary that should be known by language learners. The term is used to classify words based on their functional categories. The classification of words of a language depends on their function in communication (Hatch and Brown, 1995: 218). Words are classified based on functional words and content words. Functional words include nouns, verbs, adjectives, and adverbs. Content words refer to a thing, quality, state, or action, and which have lexical meaning. Functional words have major classes; there are pronoun, preposition, conjunction, and determiner. So, word classification membership is an important lexical feature. In the study of word classification they are: nouns, pronouns, verbs, adjectives, adverbs, prepositions, and conjunction. All word classification will be explained below.
- Nouns. A noun is a word (or group of words) that is the name of a person, a place, a thing or activity or a quality or idea; nouns can be used as the subject or object of a verb. Nouns can be divided into sub classes. There are proper nouns and common nouns. There are also countable nouns (books, pianos, birds), mass or uncountable nouns (rice, water, gravy), abstract nouns (idea, faith, religion), concrete nouns (chair, table, book), and collective nouns (class, group, government).
- Pronouns. Pronoun is a word that is used in place of a noun or a phrase. For example: she, her, he, him, they, and them.
- Verbs. Verbs are words that denote or describe an action, experience or state. Vendler in Hatch and Brown (1995) places verbs into four classes: activities (run, walk, look for), accomplishment (build, kill), achievement (recognize, find, lose), and states (know, love, have).
- Adjective. Adjective is a modifier that used to highlight quantities or attributes. The types of adjective are: (a). Determiners. They are articles (the, a, an), demonstrative adjectives (this, that, these, those), and possessive adjectives (my, your, her), numeral adjectives (four, ten, first, third), and adjectives of indefinite quantity (some, few, all). (b). Descriptive adjectives. They usually indicate an inherent quality (old, young, new), or a physical state such as (blue, yellow, red), size or age.
- Adverbs. Adverb is a word that adds to the meaning of a verb, adjective, another adverb or a whole sentence. Adverbs are similar to adjectives in many ways although they typically assign attributes to verbs, to clauses or to entire sentences rather than to nouns. Locative adverbs like ‘here’ and ‘there’ are used very early young children as ways of pointing to the location of objects. Time adverb like ‘now’ and ‘yesterday’ are used by second language learners as an initial why to mark time.
- Preposition. Preposition is a word (or group of word) which is used to show the way in which other words are connected. For example: in, on, beside, at, and between.
- Conjunction. Conjunction is a word that connects sentences, phrase, or clause. For example: and, so, but.
Those are about Kinds of Vocabulary. One is active and the other is passive vocabulary. Mastering one of them are very good. But, if it could not be achieve, one is better.