The Use of Authentic Materials to Improve the Eleventh Grade Students’ Vocabulary Achievement at SMA Muhammadiyah 2 Genteng

Abstract

Vocabulary is one of the essential aspects of English learning. To be able to communicate in English requires vocabulary and it is important to increase variety of vocabulary. With insufficient vocabulary, it is difficult for students to communicate with their English skills to others, express their ideas or opinions, understand or comprehend simple texts, and listen to the instructions of the materials that they learned. Learning vocabulary is not easy, especially to Indonesian students, where English is considered as a foreign language, because it consists of several aspects that every student must know and master, such as acquiring a lot of words, arranging correct sentence patterns and others. Therefore, students have a difficulty in memorizing or mastering new vocabulary so that their vocabulary is limited. Lack of students’ vocabulary may come from either students or teachers. From the students’ side, it includes their laziness in memorizing new words, the lack of interest and motivation in learning English. From the teachers, on the other hand, it includes the absence of fun media, materials, or methods used in English learning process. This study focused on the use of authentic materials from English newspapers for the reasons that newspapers contains of facts and they are updated. Moreover, the information share content and use language which close to the students’ real life. According to (Nunan, 1989) Authentic Material is any material which has not been specifically produced for the purpose of language, but it can be used as media whether it is in the form of printed, audio, or files. Moreover, the reasons of conducting this research were to solve students’ problems and to improve their vocabulary achievement by using authentic materials taken from English newspapers. The English newspapers used were taken from the Jakarta Post in the lead section. The researcher used the Classroom Action Research in 1 Cycle. The population of this research was the eleventh grade students of SMA Muhammadiyah 2 Genteng in the 2021/2022 academic year. There were two kinds of data collected by the researcher; primary and secondary data. The primary data were collected from the students’ observation, and vocabulary test, while the secondary data were collected from the result of interview, and documentation. The implementation of the action in the first and the second meetings were used to teach vocabulary by using authentic materials taken from English newspapers based on the lesson plans constructed. The third meeting was used to conduct the vocabulary test. This research was conducted collaboratively with the English teacher to observe the students’ participation while joining the teaching and learning vocabulary process. Based on the observation results, the percentage in the first meeting showed that 65% or 20 of 31 students were considered as the active participants, and 35% or 11 of 31 students were the passive participants in the teaching and learning vocabulary process. The second meeting showed that 84% or 26 of 31 students were categorized as active participants, and 16% or 5 of 31 students were categorized as passive participants in the teaching and learning vocabulary process. It could be seen that the students’ participation in the second meeting was higher than the first meeting. From the percentage above the students’ active participation had been achieved. In addition, that there was an improvement on the students’ vocabulary achievement by using authentic materials taken from English newspapers. It could be proved from the percentage of students’ vocabulary test. The percentage showed that 87.097% or 27 of 31 students fulfilled the standard scores determined; it means that this research was successful due to the target of the students who got the score in the vocabulary test ≥70. While, before applying authentic materials taken from English newspapers, the percentage showed that 61.29% or 19 of 31 students fulfilled the standard score that determined. Thus, it could be concluded that the use of authentic materials taken from English newspapers was successful in improving the students’ active participation and vocabulary achievement