learning. It means that the students have to master vocabulary well in order to make them understand and produce those kinds of texts easily.
Since vocabulary becomes one of the important aspects in English teaching learning process, the teaching vocabulary in the classroom should be
appropriate in order to avoid problems related to the students’ vocabulary mastery. But in fact, some students in Grade VII of SMP Institut Indonesia
Yogyakarta still faced many problems dealing with vocabulary. Those problems are first, students were lazy to memorize all the unfamiliar words that they heard
or read in a text. Second, students had difficulties in understanding or comprehending the meanings of unfamiliar words. Third, students were bored and
unmotivated to learn English. The conventional technology which is applied by the teacher seemed to force them to memorize new vocabularies without the help
of media. It made the students tend to show low attention in acquiring new vocabularies.
In relation to the vocabulary teaching, the use of instructional media could be used as a tool to attract the students’ attention, interest, and motivation to learn.
The common media that are used in the teaching junior high school students is vocabulary cards. It can give the students new vocabulary items and it is
interesting instruments which is full of colorful cards. Based on the observation conducted on 25
th
August 2015, the vocabulary teaching in SMP Institut Indonesia Yogyakarta focused on drilling. Moreover, the
media which support the vocabulary teaching such as dictionaries were not
sufficient. As a result, the students tend to find difficulties in learning vocabularies. It seemed that they were not interested in the lesson. When the
teacher asked questions, no students answered. They answered the questions if only the teacher called their name and forced them to answer. In general, the
students were passive in the classroom. Through an interview, the teacher said that drilling was the best technique
to teach vocabulary. She asked the students to memorize vocabularies and the meanings. She said that other media, such as, vocabulary cards were rarely used in
the teaching of vocabulary. Meanwhile, the students said that English was difficult to learn because
they did not know the meanings of the words that they read, wrote, or heard. They confessed that they were passive in the class, because they were afraid of making
mistakes. They also said that the teacher rarely used vocabulary cards to teach in the classroom and most activities were spent by doing exercises on a course book
and lembar kerja siswa LKS. Based on the interview with the teacher, the teacher agreed that vocabulary
cards are one of the media that can be used to teach vocabulary. It supposes to help the students in mastering vocabulary.
B. Identification of Problems
Based on the observation, students at SMP Institut Indonesia Yogyakarta faced some difficulties in mastering vocabulary and some problems in the field
were identified.
The first problem is related to the teacher. The teacher found problems related to motivate the students. She did not know how to make the students
interested in the lesson. She applied some strategies such as drilling, translating words, and repeating the instructions to help the students understand the lesson,
but they still did not work well. However, she was afraid of making the students get bored by this technique.
The second problem is related to the students. Based on the observation, most of them faced some difficulties dealing with vocabulary. Only few students
were active in the classroom and the rest tend to be passive. The students preferred to use Bahasa Indonesia and Bahasa Jawa during the teaching-learning
process to English. They said that they felt difficult to understand what the teacher said when she used English in giving instruction. Instead of making mistakes in
answering the teacher’s question, they tend to be silent.
The third is related to the learning material and media. The teacher used course book and lembar kerja siswa LKS to teach her students in the classroom.
Sometimes she made handouts for the students and gave some materials from the internet. But, unfortunately, there were only few ready-to-use teaching media
supporting the teaching learning process. The teacher said that sometimes she used pictures as learning media. In addition, the teacher said that she could not
spend much more time in preparing media. The last problem concerned with facilities. The facilities that support the
teaching and learning process such as dictionaries were not sufficient. Only some
Inggris-Indonesia and Indonesia-Inggris dictionaries available and the students could not borrow them into the classroom. Many students do not have a dictionary
and it was hard to ask them to buy the good one, since they come from middle-to- low economic families.
C. Limitation of Problems
Based on the identification of problems above, there are some problems related to the teaching and learning process. It is impossible for me to solve all
those problems. So, this research is only limited on improving Grade VII students’
vocabulary mastery in SMP Institut Indonesia Yogyakarta. The collaborator and the researcher decided to overcome this problem by using vocabulary cards
because vocabulary cards are rarely used to teach vocabulary. The teacher seemed to use mo
notonous technique so that it influenced the students’ interest toward the lesson. It can also be one of the factors that influence the low level of the students’
vocabulary mastery. Therefore, in order to make the vocabulary learning more interesting and
fun, we decided to use vocabulary cards to improve students’ vocabulary mastery in SMP Institut Indonesia.
There are some reasons why the collaborator and the researcher chose vocabulary cards to improves the students’ vocabulary mastery, 1 Vocabulary
cards may help students to facilitate them to improve their vocabulary. 2 Vocabulary cards are used as a personal dictionary for every student that can
be as medium to improve their vocabulary. 3 Vocabulary cards are also easy to create. 4 It is easy to bring and also can be the instrument to play game. 5 It is
also simple teaching instruments because it does not need additional instruments,
