The effect of using Total Physical Response (TPR) method and work list for teaching vocabulary to children

Nowadays vocabulary becomes an important thing in learning English as a foreign language. Besides, vocabulary is important to make up words in order to make communication work out. Therefore teachers should introduce vocabulary to young learners as soon as possible. Teaching vocabulary to young learners is not easy because young learners usually get bored easily. However, the writer found out that some teachers still find difficulties in teaching vocabulary to young learners. This could happen due to the teaching techniques used by the teacher. As the result, students get bored easily and can not understand the materials well. Considering the teachers’ difficulties above, the writer conducted a study about teaching vocabulary by using the Total Physical Response method and Word List. The objective of this study is to find out whether the students taught with Total Physical Response method obtain higher vocabulary achievement than students taught with Word List. In conducting the experiment, the writer used two classes of the third grade students of SD YPPI I Surabaya, belonging to the school year of 2007-2008. The research instrument used in this study was in the form of a vocabulary test consists of 20 multiple choice items. There were four options with only one correct answer for each item. The test was administered with a time limitation of 35 minutes. After conducting the three meetings of treatment, the writer administered a posttest to the two groups (experimental and control group). After collecting the data, the writer compares the posttest score of the experimental and the control group, the t-test formula for independent samples was used to answer the major problem namely “Is there any significant difference between using Total Physical Response method and word list for teaching vocabulary to the third grade students of elementary school?”. The formula was used to find out whether there was a significant difference or not between the mean scores of the experimental and the control group. After that, the writer calculated the mean, the standard deviation, and the observed t (to). Next, she determined the level of significance at 5 percent (0.05) with 38 degrees of freedom (df) which is 1.6860. The result showed that there was a significant difference between the mean scores of the two groups. Therefore, it can be concluded that the third grade students taught with Total Physical Response method got higher vocabulary achievement than those taught with Word List. In short, it can be said that teaching vocabulary using Total Physical Response method is more successful than using word list