THE EFFECT OF USING WORD CARDS ON THE SEVENTH GRADE STUDENTS’ VOCABULARY ACHIEVEMENT OF SMPN 5 TANGGUL JEMBER IN THE 2011/2012 ACADEMIC YEAR

Abstract

Vocabulary is one of language components that plays an important role in the process of learning English. Igbaria (2010:1) claims that vocabulary is needed by the students to express the meaning, receptive skills and productive skills. It means that by having sufficient vocabulary, the students are able to listen, to speak, to read and to write thoroughly. In other words, if there is no sufficient knowledge of mastering vocabulary, students will not able to express their idea or even to communicate with other. In learning vocabulary, students have difficulty in memorizing and understanding the meaning of the words. Because of that reason, the teacher needs to use media that can help the students in understanding meaning of vocabulary easily. To solve the problem, the researcher used word cards as media to help the students memorize and understand the meaning of new vocabulary. The researcher used word cards because it can create relax atmosphere and can motivate students in learning. As Doff (2000:106-108) states that doing the exercises through word cards makes the activity flexible and gives more impact on the class. Moreover Blanco and Villaneda (2008:4) say that word cards are recognized as a fun and effective way to learn. This means that word cards can be very useful and meaningful in language learning process. The purpose of this research was to know whether or not there was a significant effect of using word cards on the seventh grade students’ vocabulary achievement at SMPN 5 Tanggul Jember. The research design was quasi experimental. It began from conducting homogeneity test, deciding the experimental group and the control group, giving the treatment to the experimental group, giving the same posttest to both groups, and the last analyzing the results of the posttest by using t-test. The area of this research was SMPN 5 Tanggul Jember. It was chosen because word cards had never been used by the English teacher in teaching English, especially on teaching Vocabulary. Based on the result of the homogeneity test, class VII-C and class VII-E were chosen as the control group and the experimental group. The result of this research showed that there was a significant effect of using word cards on the seventh grade students’ vocabulary achievement. It was proven by the value of significant column of t-test table by using SPSS Software was 0.041. It was lower than 0.05. Moreover, the degree of relative effectiveness of using word cards on the students vocabulary achievement was 9.67% more effective than teaching vocabulary by using lecturing method and giving vocabulary exercises. Based on the explanations above, it was concluded that there was a significant effect of using word cards on the seventh grade students’ vocabulary achievement at SMPN 5 Tanggul Jember in the 2011/2012 academic year.