My Experiences of Teaching Vocabulary to Senior High School Students Using The Six-Step Method: A Self-Study Research

Abstract

Vocabulary is important to develop students' reading, listening, speaking, and writing skills. Teachers should have strategy to build students’ vocabulary. The six step method, that is designed by Keklik (2013), can be strategy for teachers. Pre-service teacher also can imply this method in teaching vocabulary. However, the experiences of pre-service teacher in applying vocabulary-teaching strategies are limited because previous studies have mostly analysed student outcomes instead of teachers' teaching method. This study aimed to examine how a pre-service teacher used the Six-Step Method over a 45-day teaching practicum in Jember, to teach vocabulary to senior high school students. Using a self-study research design, the researcher became participant and primary data source and the data were analyzed using thematic analysis by Braun and Clarke's (2006). Three themes resulted from the analysis: balancing teacher direction with student-led inquiry, strengthening semantic accuracy through social and visual scaffolding, and navigating word nuance within genre-based instruction. According to the findings, the six steps guided students from initial meaning-guessing to structural and contextual application inside real texts. The results imply that a combination of genre-embedded practice, peer discussion, scaffolded guessing, and dictionary use promotes deeper semantic precision and more significant vocabulary acquisition.