The Effect of Charades Game on the Eighth Grade Students’ Vocabulary Achievement at SMPN 1 Pakusari

Abstract

Vocabulary is the most important aspect in learning a language, because it is one of the elements that link the four language skills: listening, speaking, writing and reading (Ong et al., 2019). Besides, students need to use words to express their ideas, opinion, their feeling and understand what other says (Gunday & Atmaca, 2016). But the fact shows that students still have difficulties in memorizing the English vocabulary. Therefore, the English teachers have to determine the use of an appropriate technique for teaching vocabulary to develop students’ English vocabulary (Pranowo, 2006). In this research, the researcher considered to use charades game in teaching and learning vocabulary. Charades game is expected to attract students’ attention to the lesson. Quasi experimental research with post-test only design was used in this research as the purpose of this research was to know whether there was a significant effect of using charades game on the eighth grade students vocabulary achievement at SMPN 1 Pakusari or not. The researcher chose SMPN 1 Pakusari as the research area because charades game has never been used by the English teacher in teaching vocabulary for the eighth grade students in 2020/2021 academic year. The population of this research was the eighth grade students. The research participants were determined based on the result of homogeneity test by using ANOVA formula, in which the result showed that the value of the variance (0.066) was more than 0.05. It means that the population was homogeneous so that the experimental class and control class was chosen randomly. The number of the participants was 64 in total. The experimental group consisted of 32 students and so did the control group. The participants of this research were selected by cluster random sampling; VIII A as the experimental group and VIII B as the control group. The researcher taught vocabulary by using charades game to the experimental group, while the control group was taught by giving the examples and asked them to find the meaning of the vocabulary by themselves. The teaching and learning process was done online because of the pandemic Covid-19. There were two kinds of data used in this research; they were primary data and supporting data. The primary data were collected from students’ post-test, while the supporting data were collected from the result of interview and documentation. The result of the post-test was analyzed by using independent sample t-test formula on SPSS to find the significant differences of the experimental group and control group. The result of the t-test formula analysis showed that the value of the significant 2 tailed was 0.006, which means that it was lower than the significant degree (0.05). Therefore, the null hypothesis saying that “there is no significant effect of Charades Game on the eighth grade students’ vocabulary achievement” was rejected. Consequently, the alternative hypothesis saying that “there is a significant effect of Charades Game on the eighth grade students’ vocabulary achievement” was accepted. Also from the test, it showed that the mean score of the experimental group was higher than the mean score of control group. Based on the result above, it proved that there was a significant effect of using Charade Game on the eighth grade students’ vocabulary achievement. Consequently, it is suggested for the English teacher of SMPN 1 Pakusari to use charades game in teaching vocabulary. Therefore, it is hoped that charades game can be used by the English teacher because charades game is effective to attract students’ attention to be more focus during teaching and learning process and make them more enthusiast. For the students, it is suggested that they can use charades game in learning vocabulary because it can help them improve their vocabulary easily. For the future researcher, it is expected that the result of this research can be used as additional information to conduct a further research dealing with the similar topic but using different research design such as Classroom Action Research to improve students’ vocabulary achievement by using charades game. It is recommended that this study can be conducted at other