Vocabulary Teaching Strategies Used By Junior High School English Teachers

Abstract

Vocabulary is one of important aspects of English that must be learned by English as Foreign Languge (EFL) learners. In junior high school level, learners often have difficulties in understanding text genres. This difficulties are experienced when learners encounter English phrases and words they never met before. Therefore, to help students with these difficulties in their learning, teachers have to present the vocabulary learning by using vocabulary teaching strategies in order to help the students understand and learn about the English words or phrases. The use of strategies in vocabulary teaching are the application of deliberate teaching that has similar purpose with planned vocabulary teaching, as the way for developing the learners’ word knowledge. This study was conducted to investigate the strategies used by English teachers when presenting vocabulary learning to their students in the classrooms. The subjects of this study were two English teachers at Satya Wacana Laboratory Junior High School in Salatiga. Six classroom observations were conducted during the English lessons; three observations for each teacher. To obtain more data, both teachers were also interviewed for about 10-15 minutes. The data from the interview was used to support the analyzes of the data taken from the observations. The result of this study revealed that there were only three vocabulary teaching strategies that were used by the two English teachers in their English lessons. Those strategies were translation, defining the meaning strategy, and oral drill.