The Effect of Teacher-Made Vocabulary Exercises in Instagram Stories on Students' Vocabulary Achievement

Abstract

Nowadays, technology has become the foremost thing that every country should have in the era of global competition. It is because technology can be considered as the center of politics, cultures, religions, or even the education systems. Technology will constantly be updating and upgrading. Over the time, they become more advanced and successfully create some meaningful platforms used by people worldwide. Instagram comes up as a big impact from the growing technology, and people of different ages use it as a means of communication. Instagram has an exciting feature called Instagram Stories, which is the most globally used by people on a daily basis (Newberry, 2023). Moreover, Instagram stories are categorized as an exciting platform that can attract the young generation because it provides innovative features such as Instagram filters, polling, question and answer, and quiz or MCQs (Multiple Choice Questions). Therefore, the researcher thinks it can be brilliant if Instagram stories are used in a classroom setting. Resyadi (2020) says that the teacher can also apply Instagram stories to teach grammar, pronunciation, or even vocabulary. However, this study focuses only on the student's vocabulary, which becomes the fundamental part that the students should master before they reach a higher level of learning English. Therefore, the researcher conducted this research to find the effect of using teacher-made vocabulary exercises in Instagram stories on students' vocabulary achievement. Following this research's aim, a quasi-experimental research design was applied. White and Shabarwal (2014) mention that this research design is used by comparing two different groups, namely the control and experimental group, that will be selected using cluster sampling ( Ary et al., 2010). Then, from those groups, the researcher collected quantitative data, which was written down in statistical form (McCusker & Gunaydin, 2015). The data is taken from the participants' scores in a post-test section. After collecting the data, the further step is to analyze the students' scores. Here, the researcher attempted an independent sample t-test assisted by a software program called SPSS Statistics 25 to know that there is a significant positive effect of using teacher-made Instagram stories on students' vocabulary achievement. Before implementing an independent sample t-test, the researcher calculated the students' post-test scores. The non-treatment class reached a higher mean score (76.87) than the experimental class (61.25). Then, to make a valid conclusion, the researcher carried out an independent sample t-test to deeply analyze the effect of teacher-made Instagram Stories on students' vocabulary achievement after knowing that the whole data are normally distributed and homogeneous. Subsequently, the result shows that the value of Sig. 2-tailed is lower than 0.05 (0.001<0.05), indicating a significant difference in mean score between the experimental and control group. However, the t value is negative (-3.476). It means that there is no significant positive effect of using teacher-made Instagram stories on students' vocabulary achievement. Concerning the final result, the researcher believed that there might be some reasons why the use of Instagram stories did not significantly affect students’ vocabulary achievement. First, although Instagram stories successfully motivated the students, it did not mean they would have better vocabulary achievement (Li, 2021). Second, less feedback received by the students can make them have limited experience and knowledge dealing with their evaluation in vocabulary exercises (Aloraini, 2018). Then, the student’s ability to receive the material could not be assigned the same. Some students might have good vocabulary achievement right after two treatments, but some might have good vocabulary achievement after three times of treatments (Martarini et al., 2021). Furthermore, this research was conducted during Ramadhan, so the time for the teaching and learning process was cut. The time was deducted from 90 minutes to 60 minutes in a meeting. The researcher argued that this kind of situation made less conducive classroom settings and might become one of the external variables that make Instagram stories not affect students’ vocabulary achievement.