This study is aimed at: (1) finding out the quality of the existing media in the school, (2) developing and providing an appropriate English Playing Card to teach vocabulary, (3) identifying how far the effectiveness of Smart Vocab-4 Playing Card to teach vocabulary. The result of this study is expected to provide a learning media as a form of English playing card to vocabulary for the fourth grader students in elementary schools in Galur Kulonprogo in the academic year of 2014/2015.
In this research and development study, the research was designed into two main stages, the exploration stage and development stage. The data in exploration stage was qualitative procedure that was collected through library research and field study. In field study, the data was collected by observation, interview, and questionnaire. In development stage, the data was collected from the observation and questionnaire. The data in this study were analyzed by using simple statistics formula. At First, the findings on the exploration study show that there were problems faced by both the teacher and students. They are: (1) existing model was still limited; (2) the existing model was less effective; (3) the students’ difficulty in memorizing new vocabulary, difficulty to pronounce the word correctly, difficulty to write those words in correct spelling; (4) the low motivation of the students to learn vocabulary. Based on the problems, the researcher proposes a suitable learning media, English playing card. The designed media shows that it can increase the students’ abilities in vocabulary mastery. Then, the researcher developed a prototype of the English playing card. Before it was tried out in the field, the prototype was validated by the experts. After being tried out, the English playing card is effective and ready to be applied in the schools.
The result of the data analysis of the tryout shows some benefits of the English playing card: (1) The design was colorful enough and readable letter; (2) English playing card could be played in or out of school time; (3) English playing card was completed with the pronunciation words; (4) It was in a topic which was divided into several subtopics.
Finally, it can be concluded that this designed English playing card is effective to be applied as the learning media to teach young learners since it provides improvement to several problem in teaching and learning process in the class.
Keywords: learning media, English Playing card, vocabulary mastery, young learners, Research and Developmet.