Findings of the Preliminary Study

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CHAPTER IV RESEARCH FINDINGS

A. Description of the Data

1. Findings of the Preliminary Study

a. Result of Pre Observation

It was carried out to observe the process of teaching learning vocabulary activity before implementing the action. It was held on at X Electro B class of SMK Triguna Utama Ciputat academic year 20102011. There consisted of 28 students in the class. The pre-observation was conducted on September 11 th and 14 th , 2010. 80 Based on the observation , she found that the student didn‟t pay attention to the teacher; they kept talking with their friends while the teacher was explaining the material. So, the teacher got some difficulties to attract the students‟ attention. Mostly, teacher just listed vocabulary in the text book and translated it, and then they were asked to memorizing these given words. After 5 minutes given, one by one student was standing in their place to give some words which they had just memorized, minimum 10 words. The student was got hesitation because they couldn‟t remember the word easily and couldn‟t deliver these words fluently. Moreover, the student knows that their teacher is little bit „killer‟, so when the teacher asked one volunteer to be the first, there‟s no one student who wants to mention 10 words with their meaning. 80 See Appendix 8, pp.119-120. Their teacher did not implement a variation technique or another teaching aid, which may attract the students ‟ attention and motivation. After that the teacher asked the student to do the exercise on students‟ workbook, and the student, again, got difficulties because not all of the word in this exercise had given by the teacher so the teacher was in a rush to answer each of students‟ vocabulary questions, and it was wasting time. Last, teacher let the student to finish it at home and also for the memorizing 10 words. At the next meeting, only some students who did the exercise, so many reasons of why they didn‟t do the exercise, one of the student said that the task was not quite attractive so he was lazy to do it, furthermore he wasn‟t understand it.

b. Result of Pre Interview

Pre interview conducted in this study was the unstructured interview. It was held on Monday, October 18 th 2010 for the English teacher, started at 12.20 pm and finished at 12.50 pm each day at the resting time. The writer asked to the teacher some questions which divided into three categories. Those were the general condition in English class primarily on studen ts‟ vocabulary mastery achievement and performance, students‟ activities and kinds of strategies implemented by the teacher previously before Classroom Action Research. Next, the students ‟ difficulty in learning vocabulary. Last, asking about Semantic Mapping strategy. The first category talked about the general condition in English class particularly on students‟ vocabulary mastery achievement and performance, students‟ vocabulary learning activities and teachers‟ strategy that is implemented previously. The teaching learning process in technical school is quite challenging, because all of them are male and it was the teachers‟ own creativity to arrange and make the good atmosphere in the class, so it‟s quite unpredictable. But, as long as the teacher lead the class, they feel good enough because the student still give some of their attention to the lesson, it is more sufficient than none. In spite of, there always one or some students, who are lazy, become the trouble maker and sleepy. Vocabulary is always the problem of each teaching learning process because most of the student hard to remember English word, so they were difficult to develop their English ability. In teaching vocabulary, the teacher used translating method and memorizing vocabulary, for the activity she used drilling, translating and memorizing. Teacher use media such as picture and dictionary, and sometimes use LCD. 81 Second category talked about the difficulty faced by the students focus on English skill and sub-skill. The teacher said that vocabulary is the difficult skills to be learned whereas the students must achieve the Minimum Mastery Criterion- Kriteria Ketuntasan Minimal KKM. Besides, the English learning purpose in vocational school is preparing ready-work alumnus, so communication in spoken and written English language is the aim but they have lack of vocabulary to reach those aims. The students‟ difficulties in vocabulary lied on remembering those given words and lack of vocabulary on doing the exercise. Consequently, they cannot perform well in vocabulary test or practice and sometimes give up for English subject. 82 The last category is asking about Semantic Mapping strategy. The teacher said that she has never used Semantic Mapping strategy in learning vocabulary but she has known about Semantic Mapping. She assumed that Semantic Mapping could be an effective strategy in teaching vocabulary because it could facilitate the learning. It is good to help generate the ideas to make student memorizing easily and get the new vocabulary during making the semantic mapping. So, it might be able to enrich students‟ vocabulary. 83 The conclusion of the interview in term of the s tudents‟ difficulties in vocabulary was the students‟ of X Electro B class still have lack of vocabularies and have a weakness to memorize the new given words.

c. Result of Pre Questionnaire

The pre questionnaire was conducted to know about the students‟ response about English lesson especially about the vocabulary. The questionnaire used in this study was structured questionnaire. The questionnaire was given to the students in the first year of X Electro B class on Monday, October 25 th 2010. The 81 See Item Number 1-6 of Preliminary Interview, Appendix 1, pp. 71-73. 82 See item number 7-10 of Preliminary Interview, ..., pp.71-73. 83 See Item Numbers 11-14 of Preliminary Interview, ..., pp.71-73. questionnaire has three categories, they are the students‟ response toward teaching-learning process 2 items, no. 12 , the result of the students‟ vocabulary learning activity 2 items, no. 34 and the solution of the problems in vocabulary 6 items, no. 5-10, and all of them are ten items. The first category is t he students‟ response toward teaching-learning process in learning English vocabulary. The result showed 92.8 students were motivated in the teaching-learning process. Next item is students understanding toward English lesson, shows that 42.8 of t he students understood the teacher‟s explanation. It means that most of the student of X Electro B like English vocabulary lesson, despite they didn‟t mastery English vocabulary yet. The Second category is the result of student s‟ vocabulary achievement. 60.71 of the students were not satisfied with their score in vocabulary. So, most of the student were not satisfied in their score is bigger than those who weren‟t. Then, only 17.85 students could answer the teachers‟ questions about vocabulary material. I t can be drawn that most of the student hadn‟t reached a good score which passed minimum mastery criterion KKM. The Third category asks the solution of the problem in vocabulary learning. For the first item, there were so many students who didn‟t ask their teacher if they had difficulties, it‟s about 71.42. It was indicated that the student were not actively involved in the teaching-learning process and they were shy to ask their difficulty in understanding the materials. Second item, 57.14 students said that their teacher didn‟t implement the suitable technique to solve difficulties in learning vocabulary. It can be predicted that technique used by the teacher was not really appropriate and could not solve their problems in learning vocabulary mostly. After that, most student answer that the ir teachers‟ technique couldn‟t help students memorize vocabulary easily and get the new vocabulary , it‟s about 60.71 of the student. It means that most of them thought the used technique could not help them transferring the given words to their long term memory and getting the new vocabulary. Next item, 78.57 students said that their teacher gave exercise to develop students‟ ability in vocabulary, in the contrary many students, 71.24 couldn‟t do the task easily. It means that most of them faced the problem in vocabulary and thought the used technique could not help them in developing their vocabulary because not all of the words are given by teacher. So that, they hard to do the task. The last, there were only 2 students or 7.14 of them stated that they had rich vocabulary. It means that most of students‟ ability in vocabulary was still low. 84 Related to the result of pre questionnaire, it could be concluded that there were needed to improve the students‟ positive response after the implementation of the action. Therefore, the CAR was done. The writer also carried out three other questionnaires before conducting Classroom Action Research; they are students‟ background, students‟ vocabulary learning strategies and students‟ view about English learning. The writer took the background questionnaire in order to know the s tudents‟ characteristics of learning English based on their aims and the use of English in their daily life. 85 Second, t he questionnaire of students‟ vocabulary learning strategies is accomplished to help the writer found the correct strategy to enrich their vocabulary while the writer tries to the find out the suitable strategy. Based on the questionnaire, mostly the students use the creative strategy rarely; they just learn vocabulary in the traditional way such as through listing memorization. 86 Then, for the students‟ view about learning English the result reflect that most of the students are not sure if they are not confident in their English ability because for each group of this questionnaire, the biggest total number of the questionnaire laid on the third choice mostly, it is “I cannot tell for sure”. 87 Therefore, the writer also has to find the appropriate strategy to make them more motivated and feel confident when they learning English.

d. Result of Pre test

The pretest is done before the CAR, it was conducted on Thursday, November 4 th 2010. There were 25 questions in multiple-choice form and 5 in 84 See Appendix 3, pp. 78-81. 85 See Appendix 3, pp. 82-84. 86 See Appendix 3, pp. 85-88. 87 See Appendix 3, pp. 89-94. essay form, in which the students carried out the test during 40 minutes. 88 To get the result of pretest, firstly, the writer calculated the mean score: n x Mx   28 1497  Mx Mx = 53.5 After that, to get the class percentage which pass minimum mastery criterion criteria or KKM 70 in 75 of 28 students, the writer use the formula: 100 x N F   28 100 2x   14 . 7   Based on the result of the pre test, the data showed that the mean score of pretest is 33.28. There were only two students or 7.14 of the students who got the score above the Minimum Mastery Criterion- Kriteria Ketuntasan Minimal KKM meanwhile the other 26 students were below that criterion. From that analyzing, it could be seen that almost of the X Electro B students‟ vocabulary was still very low. 89 After analyzing the result of preliminary study, it could be conclude that most of the students at the first year of Electro B class had small vocabulary size. So, it needs to find out the solution to overcome this problem. The writer used Semantic Mapping strategy in teaching vocabulary as an innovation in teaching learning process. The action needed to enrich students‟ vocabulary. The action research conducted in two cycles. Every cycle followed the procedures of action research involving planning, acting, observing, and reflecting. Every cycle was 88 See Appendix 10, pp. 132-134. 89 See Appendix 5, pp. 100-101. conducted in three meetings. The following was the explanation of the action research results.

2. Findings of the First Cycle Adapted from Ghony