Improving The Students’ Vocabulary Mastery by Using Mnemonics Technique at SMP HKBP Pajak Baru Belawan

Abstract

Vocabulary is very important to be mastered to support English language skills; speaking, listening, writing and reading. Speaking would be meaningless and perhaps impossible having only structure without vocabulary. Nobody could listen clearly without mastering vocabulary. Anyone cannot understand what they read without mastering vocabulary. Moreover, writing could not be arranged vocabulary mastery. The problem are most of the students has difficulties in mastering vocabulary and difficult to remmeber new words. Therefore, many approaches are created to improve vocabulary mastery well. Mnemonic is one of technique to train good vocabulary. It is applied to help the students memorize vocabulary well and to be more easy to remember words. This study is a classroom action research. There were four steps in conducting: planning, action, observation, reflection. The subject of this study is eight grade students. This class action research was done in two cycles. Each cycle was conducted in two meeting with recount text and mnemonics as the topic of discussion. The result of this study showed that students’ improvement in mastering vocabulary was statistically significant. Based on the research conducted, the writer foun the significant improvement betwen cycle I and cycle II, it can be seen from the mean of cycle I which is 55.2 for pre test, post test in cycle I 67 and post test in cycle II 82. It can be concluded that the application of mnemonic technique can improve students’ vocabulary mastery. Hopefully, this technique can help the studentd more easy to master vocabulary.