THE EFFECT OF USING GAMES ON THE STUDENTS’ TENSE ACHIEVEMENT AT SMP NEGERI 1 AMBULU JEMBER

Abstract

Tense is one of the major factors in learning English that should be learnt and mastered by students in order to be able to communicate better since it is argued as ‘sentence-making machine’ which provides the students with the means to generate potentially a number of original English sentences (Harmer,1999:15). However, for EFL learners, learning tenses is a hard task which can sometimes be depressing. To solve this problem, it is recommended that the English teacher select an interesting and challenging learning strategy that can motivate the students’ curiosity in learning English tenses. One of the learning strategies that can meet the requirement is games. Games help and encourage many learners to sustain their interest and work (Wright et. al, 1984:1). This research was conducted to investigate the effect of using games on the students’ tense achievement at SMP Negeri 1 Ambulu Jember. The respondents of this research were the grade VII students of SMP Negeri 1 Ambulu Jember in the 2010/2011 academic year that were determined by taking the closest mean of homogeneity test results among the eight parallel classes on the VII grade students of SMP Negeri 1 Ambulu. The total number of the respondents was 70 students, which was divided into experimental group and control group by lottery. The experimental group consisted of 36 students taught by using games, while the control group consisted of 34 students taught by using non-games, that is lecturing. The primary data of this research were collected from the students’ scores of tense test, while the supporting data were gained through interview and documentation. The primary data were collected from the post test to make comparison between the two research groups after the treatment, and then analyzed by using t-test formula. Based on the calculation, the mean score of the experimental group was higher than the mean score of the control group (72.19 > 66.98). The result of the t-test analysis was lower than 0.05 (0.00 < 0.05) with 21.7% of the relative effectiveness degree. It indicated that there was a significant mean difference between the experimental group and the control group. It means that the null hypothesis was rejected, thus the alternative hypothesis stating that there is a significant effect of using games on the students’ tense achievement at SMP Negeri 1 Ambulu Jember was accepted. The research results proved that there was a significant effect of using games on the students’ tense achievement at SMP Negeri 1 Ambulu. Therefore, it is recommended that the English teacher use game as an alternative technique in teaching tenses.