Identifying the effectiveness of using songs to teach parts of speech (an experimental research with seventh grade students of SMPN 1 Bansari Temanggung in the academic year of 2009/2010)

The background of the study in this research is based on the phenomena that students in Junior High School usually get bored to learn grammar, so that the students get difficulties in mastering grammar. Grammar as one component of language that is difficult to be mastered by students takes very important role in composing language. So the teacher should device a good exercise or a way of teaching grammar. To make easier and more interesting, the researcher teaches grammar parts of speech using songs, because of songs helps the teacher to draw the students’ interest and to engage the students’ motivation. It is also make learning fun and help students to absorb the material. The researcher chooses parts of speech as material because learning about parts of speech is the first step in grammar study just as learning the letter of the alphabet is the first step to be able to read and write. Parts of speech also help to construct good sentence. So that, to studying about grammar, the students must mastery about parts of speech first. The problem of this research is how is the effectiveness of using songs to teach parts of speech in the seventh grade students of SMPN 1 Bansari Temanggung? The main objective of this study is to find out the effectiveness of using songs to teach parts of speech in the seventh grade students of SMP Negeri 1 Bansari Temanggung. This is an experimental study. The data were obtained by giving test to the experimental class and control class after giving a different learning to both classes. The teacher gave three times teaching to both classes. There were two kinds of test. They were pre-test and post test. Before items of the test given to the students, the researcher gave tryout test to analyze validity, reliability, difficulty level and the discriminating power of each item. After the data were collected, the researcher analyzed it. The first analysis data is from the beginning of control class and experimental class that is taken from the pre test score. It is the normality test and homogeneity test. It is used to know that two groups are normal distribution and have same variant. Another analysis data is from the ending of control class and experimental class. It is used to prove the truth of hypothesis that has been planned. The result of the research shows that mean of parts of speech test score of experimental class (the students who taught using songs) are 83.75 and the mean of parts of speech test score of control class (the students who taught without using songs) are 75.75. Using songs is more effective than without using songs method in teaching parts of speech. It is showed of the mean of experimental class is higher than control class (83.75 > 75.75). On the other hand, the test of hypothesis using t-test formula shows the score of the t-test is higher than the score of the t-table. The score of t-test is 2.374, while the score of t-table on = 5% is 1.99 (2.374 >1.99). The hypothesis is accepted. The result of this study is expected to be an information material for English teachers in teaching parts of speech and students who need it as reference