Improving Elementary School students' english vocabulary mastery through the teaching of local cultural content materials.

The Elementary students of a certain public school in Surabaya had difficulties in learning English. One of the crucial problems was learning English vocabulary. In attempts to help the students learn and master the English vocabulary , the researcher decided to use CAR to teach English vocabulary with local cultural content materials. The aim ofthis study was to investigate how the teaching of English vocabulary with local cultural content materials could contribute to the improvement ofthe students' English vocabulary mastery. The topics of the learning materials were selected based on Second Language Acquisition theory ; the input hypothesis (i+ 1) claims that schema is the most appropriate comprehensible input. The two principles of schemata - connections and prerequisite knowledge - were used to develop the lessons to help the students learn and understand the English vocabul ary. The topics covered in the materials are the students ' personal lives and the students' surroundings. The activities consisting of brainstorming, role pl aying, doing illustrations and visual aids, reading passages, explaining meanings of new English words, doing exercises and worksheets were connected to the students' schemata. The CAR was conducted in three cycles spanning about six months, with four topics covered in each cycle. The lessons were observed by an English teacher and all classroom activities were noted in the observation sheet. Triangulation was done through interview to the students, the observer and document analysis. The vocabulary tests were administered for each cycle with overall assessment of all the lessons done at the end of all cycles. The results show ed that the teaching of local cultural content materials in English vocabulary learning contributed to the improvement of the students' vocabulary mastery with different degree. Students who were familiar with the topics could respond the teaching more enthusiastically and improve their vocabulary mastery better than those who were not familiar with the topics. It was also found that the highest gain scores were obtained by the students who participated in both classroom and outsid e vocabulary learning. The success of the lessons was mostly due to the classroom vocabulary learning, especially 'brainstormin g' and outside vocabulary learning through 'worksheet' which were absent in previous English vocabulary learning materials. In addition, the teacher 's ability to respond the students' ideas during the brainstorming activity was also claimed to be critical to make the lessons successful. To conclud e, the teaching of local cultural content materials have contribut ed to the improvement of the Elementary students' vocabulary mastery in varying degree depending on the students' familiarity with the topics and on the students' participation in both classroom and outside vocabulary learning process. Perhaps future studies could be carried out in a more experim ental manner to quantify the results of this study or to implement other CAR type of research on other cultural aspe cts