IMPROVING THE STUDENTS’ VOCABULARY
ACHIEVEMENT THROUGH MNEMONIC METHOD
CHAPTER
I
INTRODUCTION
A.
Background
In
the globalization and information era, someone will be left behind if she or he
doesn’t master one of international languages; the international language
namely English language. English as an international language occupies the
first position in the world of communication today. This position makes English
most widely used all over the world in all aspect of human life. English is a
language used in telling our ideas to other persons. We can interact with the
other people in the world by the language, and in daily life we use more time
to do oral communication. Which enable us to exchange our ideas, feeling, and
experience.
English
language is a means of international communication, it becomes more important
now. Therefore, the government of Indonesia has placed this language in the
curriculum not only at the secondary schools, senior high schools, but also at
universities or institutes. This is applied to enable Indonesian students to
understand English. The goals of teaching English in Indonesian are mainly to
enable the students to use English in communication and can read many
scientific books which are written in English.
Learning
language will never be successful without learning and understanding the
vocabulary. Have a good knowledge of vocabulary support student to mastery
English. In teaching English, we need pay attention to many aspects. Some of
them are: reading, listening, speaking, structure, and vocabulary. But from all
aspect, vocabulary is considered as the most important. Wilkins (1978) states
that we would accept that vocabulary would be initially less important than
grammar while without grammar very little can be conveyed, without vocabulary
nothing can be conveyed.) Mukrim (2004) found that the low competence of the
students in reading comprehension was influenced by lack of vocabulary. Jumiaty
(1998) reports that the main factor faced by students in reading comprehending
a text is the lack of vocabulary. Many students cannot read and understand a
text which written in English because they do not have a good command of
vocabulary, or they doubt to express their idea in English because they have
limited vocabulary in their mind.
That
is clear, vocabulary is extremely important in learning. Someone can convey his
opinion, emotion, wish, and understand whom he speaks to with enough
vocabulary.
Vocabulary
building is not easy thing to do. We must be optimistic that if try of course
we can. Teacher has to make an effort to build their students’ vocabulary since
student will have more opportunity to identify the words during the teaching
and learning process.
Nothing
is learned if it is not remembered. But why do easily remember something, and,
despite effort, forget other? Why do we remember every detail of a particular
Saturday night party, for instance, while we have trouble remembering theories
of learning studied for a test? Storing the words in memory to be longer
becomes a big problem for everyone who wants to master a language.
In
our daily experience, we considered what we have learned not wholly stored in
our memory. In cognitive theory showed that anything we experienced or learned
will be Longley stored in memory as well as brain manages it.
Teaching
English vocabulary is not easy. May be some of the students like and eager to
study, but some others are possibly not. Teachers, in this case have a big role
to motivate all of them to have the same perception about the importance of
English today.
Based
on information from an English teachers, result about the students achievement
especially in English vocabulary at SMU at the first
grade students in the last semester, that the students’ vocabulary
achievement are still low, where the
students value average still got score 5.5 – 5.8 while the standard curriculum
is 6.5. It’s happened because the students still lack in use vocabulary.
Therefore the researcher wants to solve this problem until the students have a
good score and achieve the score 6.5-7.0 and as target in English vocabulary.
By
looking at the background above, the researcher tries to teaching vocabulary by
using mnemonic method in order to find a????
