THE EFFECT OF USING RIDDLES ON THE EIGHTH GRADE STUDENTS’ VOCABULARY ACHIEVEMENT AT SMPN 1 ASEMBAGUS SITUBONDO

Abstract

Vocabulary is one of language components that play an important role in the process of learning English. Tarigan (1993:2) claims that the more vocabulary students own, the more possible they have language competence. It means that by having sufficient vocabulary, the students are able to listen, to speak, to read and to write thoroughly. In other words, if there is no sufficient knowledge of mastering vocabulary, students will not able to express their idea or even to communicate with other. In learning vocabulary, students have difficulty in memorizing and understanding the meaning of the words. Because of that reason, the teacher needs to use media that can help the students in understanding meaning of vocabulary easily. To solve the problem, the researcher used riddles as media to help the students memorize and understand the meaning of new vocabulary. The researcher used riddles because it can create relax atmosphere and can motivate students in learning. As Marcy (2008) state that doing the exercises through riddle is an activity that the teacher can transfer the material and make students relax in the class when they accept the material. Moreover Frost (2009) says that riddles can provide an entertaining way for students to identify words. This means that riddles can be very useful and meaningful in language learning process. The purpose of this research was to know whether or not there is a significant effect of using riddles on the eighth grade students’ vocabulary achievement at SMPN 1 Asembagus Situbondo.The research design was quasi experimental. It began from conducting homogeneity test, deciding the experimental class and the control class, giving the treatment to the experimental class, giving the same posttest to the both classes, and the last analyzing the results of the posttest by using t-test. The area of this research was SMPN 1 Asembagus Situbondo. It was chosen because riddles had never been used by the English teacher in teaching English, especially on teaching Vocabulary. Based on the result of the homogeneity test, class VIIIB and class VIIIE were chosen as the experimental class and the control class. The result of this research showed that there was a significant effect of using riddles on eighth grade students’ vocabulary achievement. It was proven by the value of significant column of t-test table by using SPSS Software was 0.001. it was lower than 0.05. Moreover, the degree of relative effectiveness of using riddles on the students vocabulary achievement was 06.86% more effective than teaching vocabulary by using memorizing tehnique. Based on the explanations above, it was concluded that there was a significant effect of using riddles on the eighth grade students’ vocabulary achievement at SMPN 1 Asembagus Situbondo.