Teaching vocabulary meaningfully to the students of Eddy's English Course Jember through vocabulary network : a case study

Nowadays, learning English is a need for it is an International language spoken in almost all over the world. In Indonesia, English has been taught as one of the school subjects to endue the students with the foreign language competence. Unfortunately, in acquiring a second language, English, the learners may have some problems. Without leaving the other components of language aside, the learners find that memorizing the vocabulary is the main problem while they are learning the language. The traditional method of presenting lists of unrelated words cannot be denied as an excessively tedious, wasteful, and generally ineffective method. Conversely, Cross has stated that whatever the mode of presentation try to link all the new words in some ways and fitting new words in a network based on the Semantic ground or by the topic is very useful as well. To conflate Cross' statement and the traditional method, the writer conducts one-case study experiment to the students of Eddy's English Course Jember by teaching vocabulary meaningfully through Vocabulary Network. She has an assumption that it can enlarge the students' vocabulary as represented by their final scores in the post-test. The students scores in the post-test (79.66) are higher than the scores in the pre-test (65.33). It means that teaching vocabulary to the students of Eddy's English Course Jember through Vocabulary Network significantly enlarges their vocabulary. The writer comes to conclusion that teaching vocabulary meaningfully through Vocabulary Network can help the students to enlarge their vocabulary. This study, hopefully, should be continued by other researchers. It is suggested that the researchers use two different classes to compare this technique with other techniques of teaching vocabulary to get more conclusive results