Teaching vocabulary through reading passages on SLTP students' vocabulary : its effect on retention power

English is a compulsory subject for all students of high school. According to SLTP Curriculum of 1994, the skills of English to be taught are reading, listening, speaking, and writing. It is also stated that the main objective of teaching English at high school is to enable the students to read English textbooks as a means to develop themselves in science, technology, and culture. Because of that reason, the students should have sufficient vocabulary. In teaching vocabulary, the teacher usually teaches the students by giving a list of words and asks them to memorize it. By memorization, in fact, the students can keep the words but they are in difficulty keeping these words in mind for a longer time. The background and suggestions above have encouraged the writer to conduct a quasi-experimental study. This study is intended to find the effect of teaching vocabulary through reading passages on SLTP students' vocabulary retention power compared to the one through reading passages along with word list. The subject of this study are ninety second-year students of SLTPK St. Vincentius who belong to the school year of 1997-1998 which have the same level of intelligence based on the t-test of their sub sumative test. They are divided into two groups namely experimental and control groups. The experimental group taught using reading passages and the control group taught using word list. After four times of teaching, the writer gave achievement test to both groups to ascertain the effect of the treatment. Two weeks later, the writer gave the same test as the follow-up test to see or to detect the students' vocabulary retention power. Based on the result of the achievement test, the data shows that there is a Significant difference in the students' vocabulary achievement between the two groups. The students who are taught using reading passages have better vocabulary achievement than those who are taught using word list. Based on the result of the follow-up test, the data shows that there is no significant difference teaching vocabulary using reading passages and word list on SLTP students' vocabula1y retention power. Although the use of reading passages does not give a significant difference compared to word list the average score of the students taught using reading passages is higher than the students taught using word list as can be seen from their means. Thus, the writer is of the opinion that reading passages can help the students retain the vocabulary longer