The Effect of Using Grammar Racing Game and Guessing Mime Game on the Seventh Grade Students’ Tense Achievement at SMPN 1 Tempurejo in the 2011/2012 Academic Year;

Abstract

There are many students who get a lot of difficulties in learning English. According to Nababan (1986:4), one of the problems the students face in learning English is the use of tenses. English as a foreign language in Indonesia has a different structure from the Indonesian structure. One of the differences is that Indonesian structures do not recognize any verb changes as what is applied in English, as in the use of tenses. It often leads the students into confusion and mistakes whenever the learners attempt to produce English sentences. Concerning with the students’ difficulty in mastering tenses, the researcher tried to find an interesting technique for teaching tenses. Then, the researcher decided to use games as a technique to teach tenses. The games used were Grammar Racing Game and Guessing Mime Game. This research was conducted to investigate the effect of using Grammar Racing Game and Guessing Mime Game on the seventh grade students’ tense achievement at SMPN 1 Tempurejo in the 2011/2012 academic year. The population of this research was all of the seventh grade students of SMPN 1 Tempurejo in the 2011/2012 academic year. The research respondents were determined by a homogeneity test (a tense test, covering simple present and present continuous tenses). The number of the respondents was 71 students, consisting of 36 students of grade VII-E as the experimental group taught by using Grammar Racing Game and Guessing Mime Game, while the control group consisted of 35 students of grade VII-A taught by lecturing technique. The primary data of this research were collected from the students’ scores of tense test. The primary data were collected from the post-test to compare the two different groups after treatment, and analyzed the result by using Independent sample T-Test (SPSS). Based on the calculation, the result of this research showed viii that there was a significant effect of using Grammar Racing Game and Guessing Mime Game on the seventh grade students’ tense achievement. It was proven by the value of significant column of t-test table by using SPSS software, and the result was 0.00 which was lower than 0.05 (significant level of 5%). This means that the null hypothesis (H0) formulated: “Grammar Racing Game and Guessing Mime Game does not have a significant effect on the seventh grade students’ tense achievement at SMPN 1 Tempurejo in the 2011/2012 academic year” was rejected, thus the alternative hypothesis: “Grammar Racing Game and Guessing Mime Game have a significant effect on the seventh grade students’ tense achievement at SMPN 1 Tempurejo in the 2011/2012 academic year” was accepted. The research results revealed that there was a significant effect of using Grammar Racing Game and Guessing Mime Game on the seventh grade students’ tense achievement at SMPN 1 Tempurejo in the 2011/2012 academic year. Therefore, it is recommended for the English teacher to use Grammar Racing Game and Guessing Mime Game as an alternative technique in teaching tenses.