The effect of using lexical games on seventh graders' vocabulary achievement

When someone wants to learn a new language, there are some important things that he/she needs to learn, one of them is vocabulary. Vocabulary is a really basic component that people should learn first before learning the other components or skills. If they do not have enough vocabulary items, they will find many difficulties when trying to use the language. They cannot write even communicate with other people because they do not know what words they have to use or speak. This shows that vocabulary holds an important role in learning language. Unfortunately, vocabulary commonly gets less attention on teaching-learning activities. Considering this situation, the writer would like to conduct a study on implementing lexical games to vary vocabulary teaching. Through this study, she wants to know the effect of using lexical games on students’ vocabulary achievement. This is to know whether there is significance different between students’ vocabulary achievement before and after taught using lexical games. The subjects of this study were seventh grade students of a private junior high school in Surabaya. She took two classes, one class as the pilot group and the other one as the experimental group. On the pilot group, she tried out a vocabulary test to ensure its validity and reliability before giving it to the experimental group as pre-test and post-test. After gaining all the scores from pre-test and post-test, the writer started to calculate those scores using t-test. The result showed that the mean score of pre-test was 60 and the mean score of post-test was 76,7. It meant that the pos-test score was higher than pre-test score. For t-test calculation result, it showed that t-observation (to) was 6,01 and the t-table at the level of significance of 5% was 2,00. It meant that the t-observation was greater than t-table. From these findings, the writer concluded that Alternative Hypothesis (Ha) was accepted and Null Hypothesis (Ho) was rejected. In another word, there is a significant difference between the vocabulary achievements of seventh grade students before and after they are taught using lexical games