The effect of using songs supplemented by texts and pictures in teaching vocabulary to children at the beginning level of Eltim English Course Surabaya

Nowadays, English has become an important international language that is used in many kinds of fields by many countries. No wonder that English is considered to be an important thing for everyone to learn. In Indonesia, English is also taught to elementary school students because they are still very young and have good ability to learn something. According to GBPP' 94, the function is to give a chance to elementary school students to get knowledge and improve their English in order to anticipate the condition of society which is influenced by the development of knowledge, technology and art. Children should have sufficient knowledge of vocabulary in learning English because vocabulary is the basic element of language development. However, there is a problem which has to be solved. It is about how the teacher uses special teaching technique in order to motivate students to learn vocabulary. Songs can be used as a teaching technique in teaching vocabulary. The use of songs add some varieties to the teaching technique so that the students learn vocabulary in an interesting way. They will be interested to learn more because they find something new in the teaching-learning activity. The students enjoy the teaching-learning activity and their motivation increases and as a result they will easily understand and memorize the material given and also the target of learning can be achieved well. Using songs is good for teaching vocabulary because songs serve several new vocabulary items to the students. While the students are singing the song they also practice pronunciation. If the students memorize the song, they also memorize tho words given through the song and if the students understand the theme of the song, it helps them to understand the words' meaning. The objective of this study is to find out the effect of using songs in teaching vocabulary to beginning level students on the students' vocabulary achievement. The writer did this research in Surabaya on April 1998 until the end of May 1998. The location was in Eltim English Course, Surabaya. The subjects of this research were students of beginning level. To apply this technique successfully, the writer also used texts and pictures as the illustration of the songs as supplement. For the research design, the writer used quasi experiment where there were two groups namely experimental group and control group. The writer gave some treatments to the experimental group but for the control group she gave list of vocabulary. After treatments for eight times, the writer gave post-test to the both groups. After looking at the result of the posttest, the writer found out that the students of the experimental group got better marks than the students of the control group. It proved that songs supplemented by texts and pictures was successful to be used as a teaching technique in teaching vocabulary. In conclusion, teaching vocabulary through songs supplemented by texts and pictures has a better effect than list of vocabulary. To further researcher who also wants to use songs as a teaching technique, the writer would like to suggest that it is very important to choose songs which are suitable with the students' age, otherwise the students will not be interested to learn the songs. Besides, the teacher may use pictures as the illustration of the songs or perform some actions to make clear the teacher's explanation