A DESCRIPTIVE STUDY OF THE EIGHTH YEAR STUDENTS’ VOCABULARY ACHIEVEMENT THROUGH STORYTELLING WITH PICTURES AT SMPN 1 DRINGU - PROBOLINGGO

Abstract

In learning English, vocabulary is the most essential language component that is important to be mastered. The language learners need to master a lot of vocabularies to achieve the language skills. Tarigan (1989:2) argues that the quality of someone‘s language skill depends on his quality and quantity of vocabulary they have. The richer someone masters vocabulary, the bigger chance one masters the language. Without having sufficient vocabulary, anyone will not be able to produce utterances or sentences and they will also have limited understanding in terms of listening, speaking, reading and writing. Teaching vocabulary to the students is not an easy thing, because each student has certain characteristics and needs different treatment. Because of that reason, the teacher needs to use a technique that can help the students understand the meaning of vocabulary easily. The researcher decided to use storytelling with pictures as the technique to teach vocabulary because almost all students like story. Besides, it can bring much joy and gives the students opportunities to remember the words and understand the sentences easily. Therefore, it will enrich their vocabulary achievement . This research was conducted to know the eighth grade students’ vocabulary achievement taught through storytelling with pictures at SMPN 1 Dringu Probolinggo in the 2011/2012 academic year. The respondent of this research was class 8A students of the grade 8 at SMPN 1 Dringu Probolinggo who were taken by using cluster random sampling by taking one class of the eighth grade students which was pointed by the English teacher as the respondents. The total number of respondents was 31 students. The primary data on this research were collected from the students’ score of vocabulary achievement test, while the secondary data were gained through interview and documentation. The students’ vocabulary achievement score were collected by doing the multiple choices and matching test which covered large vocabulary (nouns, verbs, adjectives and adverbs). The result of analysis by using percentage formula found that the students’ average score of vocabulary achievement test was 72.1. It can be said that they were in the level of ‘good’ based on the classification of the score levels. Meanwhile, the results of analysis on the students’ vocabulary of each indicator showed that the mean score of the students’ vocabulary of nouns was 87.6, the mean score of verbs was 64, the mean score of adjectives was 74.4, and the mean score of adverbs was 60. From the description above, it can be concluded that the eighth grade students’ vocabulary achievement taught through storytelling with pictures at SMPN 1 Dringu Probolinggo was good.