The use of realia to improve students’ vocabulary mastery (A Class Action research at the Fifth Grade of SD Negeri Pondok 03 Sukoharjo in 2007/2008 Academic Year)

Oleh :
Wahyu Triyas Cahya - K2201061 - Fak. KIP

The fifth year students of SD Negeri Pondok 03 Sukoharjo, Academic Year 2007/2008, had problems dealing with vocabulary mastery. First, they had difficulty to remember the meaning of words. Second, they were not interested in English class. To overcome the problems, the researcher designed an action research using realia to teach vocabulary. The purpose of the research was to know whether or not teaching by using realia can improve students’ vocabulary mastery and to find out the problems occurring in teaching vocabulary to children. The writer carried out three cycles in the research. Each cycle consisted of series of steps, namely identifying the problem, planning the action, implementing the action, observing and monitoring the action, reflecting the result of observation, and revising the plan. The techniques for collecting the data were (1) observation, to observe all activities during teaching learning process; (2) test, to know whether there is an improvement of students’ achievement; (3) Interview, to know the general situation of teaching learning process and to identify the problems faced by the students. The writer was helped by a collaborator in doing the observation. The result of the research showed that using realia could improve the students’ vocabulary mastery. Using realia, the students showed great interest to be actively involved in the teaching learning process. The students could grasp the meaning of the vocabularies. Teaching using realia could attract the students’ interest in learning English. It can be seen from the computation of the students’ scores using non-independent t-test. The students’ achievement increased significantly on every cycle. In implementing using realia in teaching learning process, the writer faced problems in the first cycle dealing with writing vocabulary and the class was noisy. In the second cycle, the writer could overcome the problems in the first cycle by giving more time in writing vocabulary to the students. In the third cycle the writer did the same technique in the second cycle with the different topic to make sure that the technique was appropriate. Based on the result of the research, it is concluded that using realia can improve the students’ vocabulary mastery.