The effectiveness of using pictures in teaching vocabulary to the fourth year students of SDN Kertajaya 218 Surabaya

Vocabulary is considered as a very important element in language learning. In part of teaching vocabulary, the effort to help the students get the meaning of the vocabulary is the most important thing while the principle of focussing on vocabulary learning has been noted by some experts who have never doubted on the value of learning vocabulary. The progress of learning vocabulary means helping the students to use the second language properly because without extensive vocabulary they will be unable to use the structure and function in comprehensible communication and they never know what the words mean. That is why vocabulary is the heart of language teaching and learning. The teaching-learning of vocabulary may be assisted by the use of pictures as media to easily clarify the unfamiliar words and prevent the students from being bored condition and to increase the students' motivation in learning. Pictures are preffered to make teaching activities more effective, interesting and comunicative. In addition, the students at the Elementary school level can get the meaning of the words more easily by looking at the pictures. To measure the students' vocabulary mastery, the write constructed vocabulary tests. She made the vocabulary pretest and posttest. The multiple choice is suitable for the Elementary level, especially where the stems are replaced by pictures. It helps the students to enlarge their knowledge of vocabulary and get the meanings more easily. For the completion test where the students have to fill in the blank to make complete the sentences is also suitable for them, because it can increase their word power by completing the unfamiliar text. When the writer conducted the test to the students, there were some difficulties, because they did not know the English word for the picture and they found out completion as confusing. Then the treatments were given in kind of lessons or games, i.e. chainword, brainstorming, picture recognition, picture classification to help them broaden their knowledge and the fact showed that the students did the posttest better with help of treatments. The sample of the study was the fourth year Elementary students of SDN Kertajaya 218, Surabaya, there were 4A and 4B but since they had the same proficiency and the objective was to compare the successful of pretest and posttest, then they were considered as single sample. For the try-out the writer took another students from an English course with the same criteria. As the scores were analyzed, statistically computed and compared, there was significant difference betwen the pretest and posttest, where the mean of the pretest was 146.644 and the mean ofthe posttest was 175.517. The value of t-table 1.980 and the t-obtained (To) was -19.392. Since To is greater than Tt, Ho is rejected so it means there is significant difference between the pretest and posttest. The conclusion is vocabulary is an important element that should be mastered by the students, it supports the other English skills. The way to increase their mastery of vocabulary is by constructing the test suitable at their level and the difficulties in doing the test or in achieving the vocabulary lessons can be improved with the treatment and the help of media to maintain and even motivate them learning vocabulary. Finally, the writer realizes that this study is far from being perfect and it is hoped that other researchers can conduct more study to investigate the importance of teaching-learning vocabulary with more varied medias, techniques and tests