Fostering EFL learners' understanding of simple present tense through Teams Games Tournament (TGT) method : A pre-experimental study at junior high school in Indonesia

The research explores the use of “Teams Games Tournament (TGT)” method on students’ understanding of simple present tense – a pre-experimental study at the second grade of Junior High School in Indonesia. The main purpose of this research is to investigate whether “TGT” method is significantly effective in students’ understanding of simple present tense. It aims at elaborating the three points, namely (1) the students’ understanding before using “TGT” method, (2) the students’ understanding after using “TGT” method, and (3) the significant difference between students’ understanding before and after using “TGT” method. This is a pre-experimental study with one experimental group of 20 second grade students from one of Indonesia's Junior High Schools. The group was taught using TGT method to improve the students' understanding of simple present tense. The data were the results of a simple present tense test, given to the students before and after treatment (pretest and posttest). Furthermore, the data were analyzed for statistical analysis. The statistical results of the data analysis show that the average score of students' tests before using the "TGT" method is 44.65, which indicates a low category, and the average score of the posttest after using the "TGT” method is 80.90, which indicates a high category. Furthermore, the tcount (12.73) was higher than the ttable in terms of significance (0.95). H0 is rejected, and H1 is accepted. This indicates that students’ understanding of simple present tense is significant. It can be concluded that Teams Games Tournament (TGT) method can foster students’ understanding of simple present tense at SMP IT Insan Teladan. The researcher suggests that this learning method can be useful for teachers and students in teaching and learning English grammar