TEACHING VOCABULARY USING HANGAROO GAME IN THE FOURTH GRADE STUDENTS OF ELEMENTARY SCHOOL

Abstract

Teaching vocabulary is very important to improve the students skill, because vocabulary is one of the language components and as a base of a language. To understand English easier, the writer use hangaroo as a media to teach vocabulary. Hangaroo game is guessing the phrases by selecting letters from the alphabet to fill in the blank forming words as the answers from the given questions. Usually, the materials used in a hangaroo game consist of the definition of terms, antonym, synonym, name of tools or things and so on.

The writer thinks that by using this media, students will be easier to understand vocabulary. Moreover, the writer has two objectives of the study they are to describe how to use hangaroo game in learning vocabulary of the students at Elementary School, and to find out the advantages and disadvantages of hangaroo game in teaching vocabulary.

The result of this paper shows that hangaroo can be used as a good media for teacher. Before teaching the material, teacher makes a lesson plan. In teaching learning process, the writer is divided by three steps. The first step is in the beginning activities. It consists of greeting, getting pray together, and checking students' attendance list. The second step is the main activities, which consists of two activities. Those are activity 1 and 2. In the activity 1, the students are introducing hangaroo game, and the students are given the task to describe hangaroo game in group. Activity 2 is the assessment, and the third is closing activities where teacher review the material which is relevant to help learners attain lesson objectives. This media can help teacher in teaching vocabulary and make students easier to understand difficult word, they are easy to remember what they have been learning and can be used to add vocabulary and increase vocabulary skill. For the detail about the result, the writer writes the advantages and disadvantages. The advantages of using hangaroo are: it can support students to be interested in teaching English, games can run through the boredom, it can develop their linguistics skill, especially for spelling, pronunciation and concentration, get the students to be cooperative not competitive, it is more effective in learning English. The disadvantages of using hangaroo are students will be gambling, not every student feels comfortable, difficult for teacher in preparing hangaroo game, it is difficult for teacher to manage their students in each group.

Finally, the writer hopes that this paper can be used as a reference for English teacher who wants to improve their students’ vocabulary mastery.