The Effect of Using Realia on Students’ Vocabulary Achievement

Abstract

Vocabulary is one of the English language components that plays an important role in mastering all of English skills, including speaking, reading, listening, and writing. In reality, the students still have difficulty on remembering the words. There is one way that teacher can do to help students understand the words easily, which is using interesting media. Media are one of the ways that teacher can use to attract students’ attention in learning and to make an enjoyable learning environment. In this research, the researcher considered to use realia as media to teach students vocabulary. Quasi-experimental research with post-test only design was used in this research as the purpose of this research was to know whether or not there was a significant effect of using realia on students’ vocabulary achievement. The researcher chose SMPN 2 Bondowoso as the research area because realia have never been used as media by the English teacher in teaching vocabulary for the seventh grade students in the 2018/2019 academic year. The number of the populations was 60 in total. They were divided into two groups, experimental and control group. The experimental group consisted of 30 students and so did the control group. The participants of this research were selected by using cluster random sampling; A as the experimental group and B as the control group. The experimental group got treatment by using realia while the control group was taught without media. To collect the data, there was one way used in this research. It was a vocabulary test. The data were gained from the students’ vocabulary scores on the post test. Before the research was conducted, the researcher had admnistered a homogeneity test to know whether the population was homogeneus or not. The homogneity test was analyzed by using ANOVA (Analysis of Variance) on SPSS (Statistically Package for Social Science). The homogeneity test results showed that the population was homogenous as the value of the variance was 0.695 which was higher than 0.005. Hence, the researcher used cluster random sampling by using lottery to decide the experimental and the control groups. The results of the post test were analyzed by the researcher using independent sample t-test on SPSS program to find the significant difference of the experimental group and the control group. The result of the t-test formula analysis showed that the value of the significant 2-tailed was 0.027, which means that it was lower than 0.05. Therefore, the null hypothesis “there is no significant effect of using realia on students’ vocabulary achievement” was rejected. Thus, the alternative hypothesis “there is a significant effect of using realia on students’ vocabulary achievement” was accepted. Referring to the result of hypothesis verification and the discussion in the fourth chapter, it can be concluded that there was a significant effect of using realia on students’ vocabulary achievement. As a result, it is suggested that the English teachers could use realia since it can affect students’ vocabulary achievement. For the future researcher, hopefully it could be used as a consideration to conduct a further research dealing with the use of realia by using the different research participants and design such as a classroom action research to improve the students’ vocabulary achievement by using Realia, and also another research dealing with the use of realia in vocabulary achievement and students’ active participation because based on the researcher’s experience, most of the students in experimental group were more active rather than the control group.