The Effect of Using British Council website on Students’ Vocabulary Achievement

Abstract

A vocabulary is a list of words with their meanings and the entire set of words in a language (Hornby, 1995). The older someone is, the richer his vocabulary is. This vocabulary serves as a useful and fundamental tool for communication and acquire knowledge. According to Linse (2006), vocabulary is the collection of words that a person knows himself. It refers to the complete vocabulary and all words in a language (Barcroft, Schmitt & Sunderman, 2011). So, every word we use in our daily communication is vocabulary. Students who do not have extensive vocabulary may find it difficult to communicate in English. Difficulty in learning vocabulary is also a problem for students. Many students feel that their vocabulary mastery is still weak because they do not have a specific understanding of vocabulary (Nikmatussholikhah, 2023). This statement aligns with Wahyudin et al. (2021), asserting that without vocabulary knowledge, learners of English as a foreign or second language (EFL/ESL) will find it very challenging to communicate in the target language. However, students find it difficult to comprehend and retain English vocabulary due to their teachers' use of traditional teaching methods. Bashori et al. (2021) discovered that students who used web-based learning showed significant improvements in both cognitive and affective abilities compared to those who used traditional learning methods. Therefore, the researcher used the British Council website for media to teaching vocabulary. The research objective is to find out whether there is any significant effect of the British Council website on students‘ vocabulary achievement. In this research the sample comes from two classes of the tenth grade students of Senior High Schools in Jember in the academic year of 2024/2025, which consist of about approximately 72 students. The experiment was conducted using 36 tenth grade students in the experimental group and 36 tenth-grade students in the control group. The researcher has conducted this research by obtaining data sources from quantitative data. Quantitative data is a source of data collected by researchers that is written in statistical form. In other words, there are numbers or scores that will be included as data for this research. Here, the researcher gets the data from a test. After collecting the data, the researcher tried to analyze them by using Mann-Whitney U Test. Mann- Whitney U Test is performed when the data used is not normally distributed. In addition, the data used is also not homogeneous (heterogeneous). According to Marlina & Syamsuar (2020), the Mann-Whitney U-test also called Mann-Whitney-Wilcoxon (MWW) is an alternative test to the t-test. This test is a non-parametric test used to compare two population medians that come from the same population, also used to test whether two population medians are similar or not. Based on the result of Mann-Whitney U test, the significant value (2-tailed) was 0.006 which is less than 0.05 (0.006 < 0.05). It could be concluded that the alternative hypothesis (Ha): ―There was a significant effect of using the British Council website on students‘ vocabulary achievement‖ was accepted. Therefore, for the research findings, the researcher identified the reasons why using the British Council website can have an effect on students' vocabulary achievement. First, students in the experimental class were highly motivated to explore vocabulary using the British Council website. Secondly, that there is a show the feedback feature that students can use to find out the answers to the exercises they have done. So, students can learn from their experiences and try to solve their problems in doing assignments independently. Thirdly, the British Council website can also be used as an effective learning approach (Jamal, 2024). This can happen when students can complete each exercise properly and correctly. Furthermore, the researcher found that several factors could influence the research findings during the teaching and learning activities. In the internal factor, the use of British Council website can increase students' motivation to learn vocabulary (Sholihah and Wijaya, 2020). That way, they can receive the material well and increase their vocabulary. Then, for external factors, the convenient educational environtment creates a conducive classroom. So, the learning atmosphere becomes quiet, and the time given for teaching and learning activities is well distributed. Based on these results, the researcher concludes that there is a significant effect of using the British Council website for students' vocabulary achievement.