ABSTRAK This research was intended to implement the communicative way of teaching vocabulary. The researcher wanted to find whether communicative teaching was effective or not in teaching vocabulary. So the teaching process could flow to the natural communication situation, two sided communication between teacher and students and or students to students, to achieve students’ better vocabulary comprehension. In this study, the researcher used an action research. He chose the second grade students of Sekolah Menengah Tingkat Pertama Hati Kudus Delanggu in the Academic Year 2006 / 2007 become the subject of the research. He used two- way communication on students-centred technique to conduct his research. This technique was done by grouping the students. Then the students were given a certain topic to be discussed in their group. At the final term each group was presenting the group discussion result. The actions were planed, as follow: preparation, implementation and monitoring, and evaluation. The actions took three cycles under different topics of each cycle. The materials were taken from the students’ handbook. The topics were; Sport, Human Body, and Disease and Hospital. The results of the study were shown on the teaching-learning process and the evaluation test. The result of teaching-learning process was that the students could work on the process from the following activities: 1) answering pre-questions before they discussed the topic from their hand-out, 2) active work in the group, 3) reading the text individually or in group, 4) mentioning the new words, 5) finding the meaning of the new vocabularies found, 6) reading aloud each vocabulary, and 7) doing the exercises. The result of evaluation test was shown from the oral and the written test scores. The mean score of written test were: first cycle (5.74), second cycle (6.24), and the third cycle (5.67). While the mean score of the oral test were: first cycle (4.74), second cycle (5.64), and the third cycle (5.18). The implication of the study is that the communicative teaching used by the researcher in vocabulary teaching-learning processed did not give better students’ vocabulary comprehension. The technique which was used by the researcher works well enough to activate the students on vocabulary teaching-learning process.
