The importance of Total Physical Response Storytelling (TPRS) method in teaching English to the kindergarten students to increase their vocabulary achievement

Nowadays, English becomes one of the important languages in this globalization era. People will have difficulties in communicating with other people from other countries if they don’t know how to speak English. This is one of the reasons why English become important to learn. Adults and children are also trying to face the globalization era. Because of that parents want their children to learn English. They believe that the best time to begin studying a foreign language is during childhood. However, the writer found out that some teachers still find difficulties in teaching vocabulary to young learners. If the teacher cannot build up the children’s interest to learn English in the class, they will feel bored and frustrated in learning vocabulary because they usually forget what a word means. Considering the teachers’ difficulties above, the writer conducted a study about teaching vocabulary by using Total Physical Response Storytelling (TPRS) method. The objective of this study is to find out whether students are taught using Total Physical Response Storytelling (TPRS) method have better vocabulary achievement. In conducting the experiment, the writer used one class of kindergarten 1 students of X school, belonging to the school year of 2008-2009. The research instrument used in this study was in the form of a vocabulary test. For pretest and posttest, the writer arranged 8 pictures on a piece of paper. And for the test after each treatment, the writer arranged 5 pictures on a piece of paper. After collecting the data, the writer did her own observation to three children (see appendix 6, page 102-106). Besides, the writer also analyzed the gain score by using t-test formula at 5 percent (0.005) level with 40 degrees of freedom (df). The result showed that there was a significance difference for the vocabulary achievement of kindergarten students who were taught using Total Physical Response Storytelling (TPRS) method. Therefore, it can be concluded that Total Physical Response Storytelling method in teaching of vocabulary can help the students to understand and remember the new vocabularies more easily and clearly