The effectiveness of mapping and acronyms as teaching techniques to teach vocabulary to improve junior high school students’ vocabulary achievement

In the real English teaching and learning practice, most of English teachers at Junior High Schools always try to finish all of English materials that were prepared for their students based on the curriculum on time. Thus, the teachers tend to deliver the materials quickly without considering whether their students have really mastered the materials or not. Due to time limitation, teachers at school do not give the same portion to teach English skills and English components. What is more, they rarely give special time to teach vocabulary. They teach vocabulary items indirectly while they are teaching reading. In addition to this, they rarely use various teaching techniques to teach English materials. Consequently, most of Junior High School students do not like to learn English. They feel that English is so boring and it is very difficult to learn. As a result, they lack English ability. Since vocabulary is the heart of language teaching and learning (Carter & Mc. Carthy, 1988: vii); and it is needed by students in order to be able to listen, speak, read, and write (Finocchiaro, 1969: 8), the writer realizes that vocabulary development is very important for students to develop their English skills. Thus, the writer wants to help the English teachers to overcome these problems. She wants to tell the teachers which teaching techniques are effective to teach vocabulary. The writer was very interested in mapping and acronyms because of their benefits and usefulness in teaching and learning vocabulary. Therefore, she wanted to know whether or not mapping and acronyms could be used as teaching techniques to improve students' English development; and whether they significantly influence students' English development. Thus, to find the answer, the writer conducted the experimental study in two classes of Stella Maris Junior High School Surabaya for three months. The samples of the experiment were the students of class II-A and class II-B; and the doer of the experiment was the English teacher of the classes. From the result of the experiment, it showed that mapping and acronyms gave significant influence to improve students' vocabulary development Thus, the writer wished to suggest both Stella Maris Junior High School English teachers and students to use mapping and acronyms as their teaching and learning techniques in their teaching and learning process. However, since the study was only conducted in three months; and there were many limitations in this study, the writer did not aim to generalize the result to all of Junior High Schools. In addition, further studies related to this topic are needed