The use of E-worksheets to facilitate young learners’ English vocabulary mastery : A case study to the seventh grade of Junior High School Students

The COVID-19 pandemic has forced the teaching and learning activities to switch to online learning. Therefore, the teacher must look for instructional media that can still be implemented well even in online learning which has never happened before. Electronic worksheets are an alternative media in facilitating online learning, especially in learning English vocabulary to young learners. Thus, this study is intended to explore the use of e-worksheets in facilitating online teaching and learning English vocabulary to young learners. This study focuses on exploring the learning process, the teacher’s opinion, the students’ responses, and the students’ English vocabulary mastery. This present research uses a qualitative research method with a case study approach. Observations, interviews, questionnaires, and tests are used as the research instruments to collect the data. The observations are used to describe the learning process using the e-worksheets. Then, the interviews are used to explore the teacher’s opinion of how the e-worksheets help young learners learn English vocabulary. Next, the questionnaires are used to analyze the students’ responses to the use of e-worksheets in learning English vocabulary. Last, the vocabulary tests are used to describe the students’ English vocabulary mastery. The research participants are a teacher and 34 students (one class) of seventh-grade of junior high school, which is selected by a homogeneous sampling technique. There are four important findings of the research. First, the e-worksheets are used in three different activities; as a warm-up, teaching materials in the core activity, and a review. However, the e-worksheets do not show any electronic features. The e-worksheets that is seen during observation is only an image shared to a WhatsApp group. The use of e-worksheets is carried out through four steps; (1) The teacher shares the e-worksheets (2) The teacher instructs on how to do the e-worksheet (3) The students work on the e-worksheets (4) The teacher provides feedback on the students’ works. Second, based on the interviews, the teacher believes that the use of e-worksheets helps young learners stimulate and motivate them to learn English, especially making the students get a lot of new vocabulary. Third, most of the students’ responses to the use of e-worksheet in learning English vocabulary are positive. Fourth, the vocabulary test results have proven that the students master the English vocabulary on certain learning topics. This research recommends the teacher to apply the contextual learning consistently both in terms of using the e-worksheets and the e-worksheet contents. This study also suggests the future research to choose a more appropriate time where the learning process is using worksheet in “electronic” features genuinely to make the analysis results more in-depth