A STUDY OF ENGLISH VOCABULARY USED IN ONLINE LAO FOOD RECIPES STUDY OF ENGLISH VOCABULARY USED IN ONLINE LAO FOOD RECIPES”

The purpose of this study is to analyze English vocabulary usage in online Lao recipes from a cooking website. The aim of this study is to analyze frequency of eight categories of parts of speech; noun, pronoun, adjective, verb, adverb, preposition, conjunction and determiner. This study is a survey research. The data collection is from 21 Lao recipes selected for analysis. The researcher maintained the use of data analysis by apparently using the frequency and percentage of various types of part of speech as a tool to use for teaching English language most effectively. According to the aims consisting of types of parts of speech divided into eight categories from an online Lao food recipe site entitled: “Lao recipe from a cooking website” was used for summa -rizing the usage frequency of parts of speech from 21 Lao recipes. In the final conclusion, that was taken from the result it was found that “Noun” is the highest frequency part of speech that was frequently used in recipe writing with a count of 1390 words that is a frequency percentage of 42.78%. That is twice the usage frequency of verb which is ranked second amongst the eight parts of speech. The analysis accounting of “Verb” found that there was a total verb word count of 594 words or 18.28%. In contrast, “Determiner” is the part of speech that was the least frequently used in selected recipes with the total work count of 46 words that is a frequency of 1.44%.


INTRODUCTION
Learning English through cooking and writing recipes is a way to improve students' English learning skills. An English teacher at a language school in Bangkok claimed that learning English through cooking classes can increase the cognitive development of students (A Little Something School, 2009). It increases the logical thinking, improves skills in navigating and following directions. According to some studies and previous work of some EFL teachers, it was found that cooking and recipe writing has been used in English classes for many years. However, it still needs more updates and practical teaching and learning strategies. Howatt & Widdowson (2004) mentioned that the trend of English teaching method has changed the focus of teachers' attention from grammatical to lexical feature by focusing on students' objectives.
To review some food recipes online, the researcher realized that it was as easy as using uncomplicated recipes of simple food that we can find in the kitchen. That process can significantly improve our second language learning not only at home, but also within the classroom. It can result in a substantial knowledge gain with these recipes. If we talk about food and recipes inside the classroom it can help ESL learners enhance their vocabularies that are related to food, their oral skills (brainstorming, discussion, and giving instructions), their written skills (describing and giving instructions), their knowledge of different cultures (learning foreign recipes, food, and tradition), and healthy habits.
It is a good strategy to be more familiar with the different foods and ingredients to be used in the recipes. Additionally, students will also be introduced to vocabulary covering the different terms used in cooking, and the utensils used when preparing and cooking the food. So it does not limit students to food vocabulary alone, thus it gives them a wide variety of vocabulary in different areas. Next point is the enhancement of students' oral skills to a point where they can share their thoughts and speak out with their own voice. They can also practice on how to give some directions or commands or they can switch places and be the one who receives the direction or command from another student. Following that is their written skills where they can practice building sentences from their vocabulary and just use some substitution to expand their idea on how to form their own sentence. Fourth one is their knowledge of different culture. They can explore culture from other countries through using recipes from those countries. They can also become familiar with the reasons people from other regions and countries eat certain foods and use certain ingredients, including proteins, herbs, and spices. Will this this country use rice, pasta, or potatoes as its main carbohydrate. Does culture and geography influence what people eat? Finally, there is the issue regarding promotion of healthy habits where students can learn that preparing healthy food can promote a healthy life and lifestyle for oneself.
As an educator, using food recipes can promote the enhancement of English learning inside the classroom. I also believe that it can promote harmonious relationship with the students as they can share their own ideas and their own opinions in cooking and learning English.

PURPOSE OF THE STUDY
The purpose of this study is to analyze English vocabulary usage in online Lao recipes from a cooking website.

SCOPE OF THE STUDY
The material of the study was taken from http://www. sbs.com.au/food/cuisine/lao. There were 21 Lao recipes chosen to analyze. The study focused on parts of speech in eight categories; noun, adjective, verb, adverb, preposition, pronoun, determiner, and conjunction. The selected recipes analyzed in this study consist of several parts. There are some short introductions about the history and background of Lao food, how to eat the food, some sections that inform the readers about how many servings for the recipe, and preparation and cooking time. These sections mentioned are not related to the findings; therefore the researcher did not include them in the analysis process.

SIGNIFICANCE OF THE STUDY
The findings in this study will be beneficial for EFL students to learn vocabularies through food recipes by reading and following the recipes' instructions. They can practice writing skill by creating their own recipe as well.

Uniqueness of Lao Food
Lao cuisine is different from other Asian cuisines. However, it has been influenced by Thai, Vietnamese, Chinese, and French. The dishes with the greatest similarities are from Isaan, the northeastern region of Thailand. Lao people prefer to prepare their meals from scratch using whole foods and fresh ingredients. Their meals generally contain rice or noodles, vegetables and herbs, meat, and fowl or fish. Lao cooks like to add flavor to the dishes with galangal, lemongrass, and fish sauce. Their favorite rice to have with a meal is sticky rice. For dessert, fresh seasonal fruit, such as, mango, pineapple, water melon, or dragon fruit, are the choice. The method for cooking meats and fish are grilling, steaming, or barbequing. The favorite drinks to have during meals are beer, water, or fruit juices. There are popular dishes in Lao. The most popular is laap. Laap is made with thinly sliced meat or fish mixed with fish sauce, lime juice, chili, spring onions, coriander, and roasted crushed rice. It is normally served with sticky rice, fresh vegetables, and herbs. Another popular dish is pho (pronounced feu). It is a savory broth with meat, noodles and vegetables. This is just a brief overview of the eating and cooking habits of Lao people.

The usefulness of English recipe for EFL learners
To review some food recipes online, the researcher realized that it was as simple as using the recipes containing common foods that we can find in the kitchen that can truly improve our second language learning not only at home, but also inside the classroom. Learners can substantially increase the amount of English language knowledge with these recipes. If we talk about food and recipes inside the classroom that can help ESL learners enhance their vocabularies that are related to food, their oral skills (brainstorming, discussion, and giving instructions), written skills ( describing and giving instructions), knowledge of different cultures (learning foreign recipes, food, and tradition), and healthy habits. It is a good strategy to be more familiar with the different food and ingredients to be used in the recipe. Additionally, students will also encounter vocabulary about the different terms used in cooking, and the utensils used when preparing and cooking the food. So it does not limit students to food vocabulary alone, thus it gives you a wide variety of vocabulary in different areas. Next point is the enhancement of students' oral skills where they can share their thoughts and speak out using their own voice. They can also practice on how to give some directions or commands or they can switch places and be the one who receives the directions or command from other students. Next, their written skills can improve through the practice building sentences from their vocabulary and just insert some different words as substitution to broaden their idea on how to form their own sentence. Fourth, is their knowledge of different culture where they can explore other culture by using recipes from other countries and so they can be familiar about why these people eat these kinds of food and how does their culture affect their food variety. The final one is the promotion of healthy habits where students can learn that preparing healthy food can promote a healthy living and a healthy life for oneself.
As an educator, using food recipes can promote the enhancement of English learning inside the classroom. I believe that it can promote harmonious relationship with the students as they can share their own ideas and their own opinions in cooking and learning English.

Review about the website: Laos Recipe (Images and videos)
The SBS or the Special Broadcasting Services has provided a good set of native Lao recipes which shows the heart of the native cuisines of Laos. It was nice to read an article presenting the uniqueness of Lao food among Asian and other countries. From the ingredients and from the way they eat, it was cited and it was good to have known about the facts that distinguish Lao people from other people. Along with the recipes were videos and images presented in each food recipe. After clicking your desired recipe, it will take you to another link that will present you the recipe itself. Along with the video and mages which I think is a good thing because the emphasis of a single recipe in a single page is really good to focus on what recipe you want to scan through.
In terms of image presentations, SBS has done a good job in presenting the different Lao food. The images showing the Lao food really looked appetizing. It displays detailed images of what is expected from the recipe. Another strong move made by SBS was to provide videos showing the preparations and how the cooking must be done. The videos are recorded with a high quality video camera and they were really entertaining to watch and experience the Lao way. Though there are strong points about the website, there are also things that the researcher identified while browsing the Lao recipes that could be improved to make the website even better and more effective as an ESL learning resource. First is, some recipes do not include videos to support the text but there are clear images on the webpage to illustrate the steps. The recipes are easier to follow if there is a video to show the entire process. For that reason the researcher believe and based on my experience it would be better if all recipes would be accompanied by a video. Second, the researcher know that some recipes were prepared and presented by a Lao native and it was really good that she shared some of her experiences growing up. However, the researcher considered the notion of what if she had grown up in Australia? Would that fact not only affect the food that she can make but how she would prepare the recipe as well? How would his method of preparing the dish compare with the same dish being made by a Lao person in Lao? But even though the researcher had this question in my mind, it was nice to see Luke Nguyen in most of the videos cooking the Lao recipes provided by SBS. Luke Nguyen is an Australian chef of Vietnamese descent chef that presented different Lao food in the same settings and environment that Lao people usually cook and prepare their food. He even cooked with a Lao native and spoke some Lao words to communicate with the natives. The researcher consider that a conscientious move added to the authenticity of the recipe being prepared in the video to add to the believability of the viewers and potential cooks of the recipe.

Related Studies
There was a scholar who studied the genre move structure and lexico-grammatical features of 40 main dish recipes. The results showed that "noun" is the most used part of speech in the writing of recipes while pronoun is the least used part of speech found from the study. The results of the study also display the flow structure of the recipes which were; introduction, recipe name, related information, ingredients, cooking instruction, additional guidance, and side dish recipe. The author mentioned that recipe writing was unique unlike other types of writing (Potiantong, 2010: abstract). The present study has adapted the analysis process of this study with Lao food recipes. Poompuang (2005: 17) studied English usage in perfume adverting from a website. The purpose of the study was to examine the linguistic features used in perfume advertising. The design of the research was qualitative which analyzed data in the area of persuasive language, figurative language and word formation. The results of the study revealed that there were three styles of linguistics features used in the collected data. Most perfume advertisements employ persuasive messages and more than half of the advertisements contained figurative language forms. More than three-quarters of the findings consisted of word formation.
Meksujit (2002:36) conducted a case study toward grammatical structures used in business section of The Nation and the Bangkok Post. The study was to analyze and compare grammatical structures used in business news. There were 5 aspects of grammatical structures used to analyze in this study; the sentence structures frequently used in each newspaper, the four sentence types, the relative clauses, the omission of verb to be in present and past participle and the active and passive voice. The results showed that business news in The Nation and Bangkok Post newspapers use more or less the same grammatical structures. Each grammatical structure of both newspapers shares the same ranks even though the percentage of each grammatical structures are significantly different.
Panpim (2004: 27) explored and analyzed some linguistic features found in English pop songs. The author selected 100 English songs from websites. There were 10 linguistics features, divided into 5 features of syntax and other 5 features of semantics. The features of syntax were; the uses of contractions, emphatic "do", non-standard words, inversions, and grammatical errors. The features of semantics are the use of idioms, similes, metaphors, personifications, and redundancies. The findings of the study showed that the most used feature of syntax was the use of non-standard words. The lower ranks are contractions, inversions, grammatical errors, emphatic "do", respectively. The most used feature of semantics was the use of idioms. The lower ranks are metaphors, similes, personifications, redundancies, respectively.
A case study was conducted to study language styles used in film synopses of DVD video box covers. It aimed to find typical characteristics, categories of words used in film synopses and grammatical structures of sentences. The case study analyzed 30 film synopses and used the Right-Writer program to facilitate in analyzing. The findings found that there were19 typical characteristics of film synopses. The data analysis in terms of word categories found that noun has the most frequent usage. Simple sentence is the most popular structure of sentence in film synopses. Language usage in film synopses is strong but easy to read which was analyzed by Right-Writer program (Roongsitthichai, 2003: 29-31)

MATERIALS AND METHODS
The study focused on analyzing content for eight categories of part of speech; noun, adjective, verb, adverb, preposition, pronoun, determiner, and conjunction usage of online Lao food recipes. The data from this study was quantitative.

SETTING AND MATERIAL OF THE STUDY
The selected recipes in this study were from http://www.sbs.com.au /food/cuisine/lao. This website is "Special Broadcasting Service (SBS)" which was established in 1978 to provide special multilingual broadcasting services for ethnic communities in Australia. The selected section for this study was about Asian food and cuisine. The researcher chose Lao food recipes to study because they are special and interesting local food for foreigners. The research instrument in this study was a checklist which determined and categorized parts of speech in eight aspects; noun, adjective, verb, adverb, preposition, pronoun, determiner, and conjunction from each recipe.

RESEARCH PROCEDURES
The procedures of data analysis of this study were; step 1: Analyze the recipes by categorizing the words used in recipe writing into group according to the structure of parts of speech, which are divided into eight sub-categories; noun, adjective, verb, adverb, preposition, pronoun, determiner, and conjunction, Step 2: Categorize the analyzed data, Step 3: Compute the percentage to get the frequencies of each word, Step 4: Analyze the data and make the conclusion and discussion. According to the analysis, the following data is the result of the frequency of parts of speech found in the selected recipes.

DATA COLLECTION AND ANALYSIS
Twenty-one Lao recipes were collected from the selected website. The recipes selected in this study have a word count of approximately 3,000 words with an average word count of 140-150 words per recipe. According to the information the researched read during this study a good recipe should be concise, short, to the point and, easy to understand and follow. The recipe with 300-500 words is a good length, which is randomly calculated from the online recipe. After the collected data had been categorized, the researcher analyzed all the data in percentages to find out the frequency in each category and conclude the results with clear and concise explanation.

THE FINDINGS
According to the results, the part of speech with the highest frequency of use percentage found in Lao food recipe writing is "noun", the second most frequently used was "verb", the results are the same as Saesiew (2005), who analyzed parts of speech from motoring news. Food recipe is a kind of text that gives instruction to the readers in contrast, Lao food recipe is a kind of text that gives instruction to the readers too. These two studies had the same result, it could be explained that "noun" and "verb" are the parts of speech that are most important and can be found in many types of media. As Howatt & Widdowson (2004) mentioned that to focus on process of learning with the student's activities is more effective, the new designed teaching strategy of learning through recipe writing could be a good choice in order to develop the students' proficiency. On the other hand, food recipes should be concise and with easy to follow steps. Each section of the recipe is written in order so it can be easy to read and follow the instructions.

CONCLUSIONS & RECOMMENDATIONS
The purpose of this study is to analyze English vocabulary usage in online Lao recipes from a cooking website. The aim of this study is to analysis frequency of parts of speech in eight categories; noun, pronoun, adjective, verb, adverb, preposition, conjunction and determiner. This study is a survey research. The data collection is from twenty-one Lao recipes chosen to analyze. The researcher maintained the use of data analysis by apparently using the frequency and percentage of various types of part of speech as a tool to use to make English language teaching more successful. According to the aims the consistent types of part of speech make eight categories in the content of an online Lao food recipe site entitled: "Lao recipe from a cooking website." Were analyzed for the frequency use of parts of speech from twenty-one Lao recipes In the final conclusion, from the result it was found that "Noun" is the part of speech with the highest frequency used in recipe writing with the a total word count of 1390 words with a frequency percentage of 42.78%, which is twice as high as "Verb" which was ranked second in terms of frequency of use. The usage of "verb" mostly found from the analysis accounting with a total word count of 594 words or 18.28% in terms of frequency of use. In contrast, "Determiner" is the part of speech that was used the least frequently in the selected recipes with a total word count of 46 words and a usage frequency of 1.44%.

RECOMMENDATION FOR THE PRESENT STUDY
1) The scope of the study could be broadened to include a larger sampling of online food recipes to get more details. 2) Other materials such as news, movies, newspapers, advertisements etc., should be considered to study as well. 3) Students who study English can utilize this analysis as a useful source to increase their understanding of parts of speech use in online food recipes more easily without the pressure having a teacher standing behind him or her.

RECOMMENDATION FOR FURTHER STUDIES
1) This case study merely covers the analysis of parst of speech of English Vocabulary Usage in Online Lao Recipe. Further study should include other kinds of recipes such as receipes from other Asian countries to see the different vocabularies and know more about other cultures. 2) This case study was conducted based on recipes. It would be interesting if the study was conducted in other languages to see the differences in news, sport news, etc. 3) This study can truly affect the learners to learn the English language by using the "Online Lao food recipe" website. It's certain that this study can provide basic knowledge for those who are interested in studying linguistic elements in any other forms; furthermore the study should analyze the grammatical structures used in English food online as well.

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
I am heartily thankful to my advisor, Nutprapha Konghet Dennis, Ph.D whose encouragement, guidance and support from the initial to the final level enabled me to develop an understanding of the study. I also would like to make a special thanks to the director of Pakse teacher training college and the Dine of Graduate School, Ubon Ratchathani Rajabhat University whose give me a chance and support for the fund. My appreciation also goes to my English teachers at Pakse teacher training college for their encouragement, useful guidance and many helps. Without their kindness I could not understand and access to useful data. Additionally, I would like to thank my wonderful family who always love me and support me in many ways. Their love and care fulfilled my spirit to finish my work. I also would like to thank all my fellow class made M.A.9 who have generously encouraged, helped and support me during the hard time. Lastly, I would like to thank my brother who helped and support for the fund. I offer my regards and blessings to all of those who supported me in any respect during the completion of the study.