| dc.description.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. | en_US |
