IMPROVING STUDENTS’ VOCABULARY ACHIEVEMENT THROUGH MAGNETIC BOARD MEDIA

The purpose of this study was to find out how the application of the Magnetic Board Media to improve students’ English vocabulary achievement. This is a Classroom Action Research which used the Kemmis & Mc. Taggart Model in two cycles. Each cycle consists of four stages: plans, actions, observations, and reflections. The subjects in this study were students of Grade IV-A of The State Elementary School No. 104202 Bandar Setia Percut Sei Tuan. The object of this study was the application of Magnetic Board Media to improve the students’ vocabulary achievement. Based on the results of the study, it was found that the percentage of completeness from pre-action, Cycle-I and Cycle-II increased. The percentage of student’s completeness in pre-action was 18%, in the Cycle-I was 53%, and in the Cycle-II was 87%. There was a significant increase 69% from pre-action to cycle-II. Thus, this study was successful and can be said that the use of the magnetic board media can improve students' vocabulary achievement, long term memory, and motivation.


INTRODUCTION
Education holds the key position in providing qualified human capitals. The fundamental task of education is as an instrument to equip the necessary knowledge and skills for the whole community in order to enable them to compete with others and improve their quality of life. Elementary school is the first six years of formal education that occurs during childhood. As the first level of education, it should be able to give the strong base to Language is a central aspect in developing students' intellectual, social, and emotional. It is a decisive factor of the student's success in learning all subjects.
Psychologically, it has a great role in human thinking process. It has been a main thinking device. All ideas, concepts, thoughts, and feelings are expressed in language. One of the languages often used as a means of communication is English. English as the first foreign language was taught to secondary and tertiary levels of education, but since the beginning of 1990s it is taught earlier due to the needs and development of the century. It has been a great demand to master English well in spoken as well as written forms.
In language learning, vocabulary is one of important elements that link the four language skills of listening, speaking, reading, and writing together. It is a basis of a language. It is very important to be mastered first. Therefore, a person who wants to be able to communicate in a certain language has to master the vocabulary of that language for the first time. An English young learner, in this case, has to master English Vocabulary of about 500 words a year. This means that they need to master 10-13 words a week.
But, the fact shows that the mastery of vocabulary can not be reached optimally. The students face some difficulties in memorizing and mastering English vocabulary successfully. It can be seen in the student examination result below: In the teaching-learning process, students' achievement is an indicator in measuring the successful of study. Bloom (1956) asserts that the achievement shows the capability development in someone which is categorized into three aspects, namely cognitive, affective and psychomotor. The cognitive domain involves knowledge and the development of intellectual skills. This includes the recall or recognition or specific facts, procedural patterns, and concepts that serve in the development of intellectual abilities and skills.
Cognitive covers knowledge, comprehension, application, analysis, synthesis, and evaluation. Knowledge is the ability to recall the data or information. Comprehension is the ability to understand and interpret the information. Application is the ability to use and apply a concept in a new situation. Analysis is the ability to separate the concept into component parts and distinguishes among them. Synthesis is the ability to build a structure or pattern from diverse elements. Evaluation is the ability to make judgments about the value of ideas or materials. The categories can be thought of as degrees of difficulties, the first ones must be mastered before the next ones. Response is the skillful performance of motor acts that involve complex movement patterns.
Proficiency is indicated by a quick, accurate, and highly coordinated performance, requiring a minimum of energy. This category includes performing without hesitation, and automatic performance. Adaptation is skill that is well developed and the individual can modify movement patterns to fit special requirements. Origination is the ability to create new movement patterns to fit a particular situation or specific problem. Learning outcomes emphasize creativity based upon highly developed skills. An Achievement is gained from the combination of the three aspects.
It can be concluded that achievement is an indicator in measuring the successful of study which is shown by the development of intellectual skills, the growth in attitudes, emotions, and feelings, and the development in behavior or skills. In line with this, it can be said that the students' achievement in vocabulary, especially for young learners, is the students' ability in recalling, understanding, interpreting, and using vocabulary which is shown by their attitudes in receiving and responding it mentally, physically, and emotionally.
Vocabulary is the total number of words in a language. It is all the words of a language that is used or understood by a particular person or group as a means of expression.
Firdayanti, Improving Students' Vocabulary Achievement... 177 In language learning, vocabulary is one of important elements that link the four language skills of listening, speaking, reading, and writing together. Schmitt (1997) asserts that vocabulary is a basis of a language; it is very important to be mastered first. Therefore, a person who wants to be able to communicate in a certain language has to master the vocabulary of that language for the first time.
With reference to the vocabulary mastery, Suyanto (2010) (6) homonymy. There are nine facets to know a word in vocabulary learning, they are: (1) orthography, (2) phonology, (3) reference, (4) semantics, (5) register, (6) collocation, (7) word associations, (8) syntax, and (9)  In the teaching of English vocabulary for young learners, often the teachers of EYL just give out words without any context. The fact is that when the words are presented in context, the learning will take more concrete because the students have a thorough understanding.
The teaching of vocabulary can be done through four stages, namely: a) introducing; the teacher introduces a new word with a clear and correct pronunciation by using pictures or real objects, 2) modeling; the teacher gives an example by acting as a model, 3) practicing; the teachers train the students to imitate and practice, 4) applying; the students apply in the right situation with the help of teachers. The teaching of vocabulary in lower class is given by using techniques "listen and repeat" or "listen and point to"

Assessment of Vocabulary
Assessment is the process of gathering information about a student in order to make decisions about his or her education. It is used to help student to learn and gauge their progress (Paul & Dylan, 1998). Moreover, Butler (2001) asserts that the purposes of assessment are to provide feedback to students and to serve a diagnostic tool for instruction.
By giving assessment to the students after teaching learning process, the teachers know whether the materials and learning strategies used are workable. Besides, the teachers will know how well their student learning progress, and know what student need to do next to continue learning.
The Assessment in vocabulary is needed to know how well a student has knowledge about the words. The aspects which are assessed in vocabulary are: (1) able to recognize the words, (2) able to relate the word to an appropriate object or concept, (3) able to spell the word correctly, (4) able to understand the meaning of the word, and (5) able to use the word in the appropriate grammatical form (Butler, 2001).

Media
In learning a foreign language, media plays a very important role because it can make learning experience far more concrete and memorable. Further, it enhances the teachinglearning process (Kariman, 1990).
The purpose of media is to facilitate communication and learning (Smaldino, 2005).
Hamalik (1994) states that the using of media in teaching learning process can rise up students' interest, motivation, and stimulus in learning. Then, media can also enhance and promote learning (Smaldino, 2005). There are six basic types of media used in learning and instruction (Smaldino, 2005).
The first category of media is text. Text is alphanumeric characters that may be displayed in If instructional media is used effectively, there must be a match between characteristics of the learner and the content of the methods, media, and materials (Smaldino, 2005). Similarly, Kariman (1990) says that any medium is good if it is suitable to the situation in which it is used. Magnetic board is a display surface media constructed from a thin sheet of galvanized iron, a cookie sheet, a lap tray, or any similar thin sheet of metal. The visual displayed being used on a magnetic board is pictures. The picture is backed with magnets and then placed on the magnetic board.

b. Making a Magnetic Board
Due to the lack of magnetic board media at the school, it needs to make the media based on the steps suggested by Smaldino (2005). The steps are: 1) a piece of iron sheet framed by wood frame in order that edge of iron sheet doesn't injured hands when take or use it.
2) fasten the hooks on the back of magnetic board to hang it to the blackboard.
3) paint the magnetic board in order to be more colorful and attractive.
Pictures and alphabets as visual that suitable to the lesson are printed, stick it on the cutting cardboard, and then stick a magnet on the back of the pictures and alphabets.

c. Advantages of Magnetic Board
Magnetic board can be used to introduce and present vocabulary through visuals in the form of pictures. The main purpose of using it is to encourage students' creativity by allowing them to manipulate the letters and other materials. Thus, it enriches students' vocabulary.
Pictures play an important role in Teaching English as a Foreign Language (Zhang and Chen, 1989). Through a thoughtful use of pictures, students of English can experience the best chance of practicing English (Kariman, 1991). Similarly, Heinich, R., et al. (1985) says that the primary function of a picture as a communication device is to serve as a more concrete referent to meaning than the spoken or written word. Words are arbitrary symbols.
They do not look or sound like the thing they represent. Pictures, however, are iconic. They normally resemble the thing they present. Thus, the pictures can be a guide and stimulus students to give response. Shy children may particularly profit from this kind of activity. (Smaldino, 2005).
In addition, Firdaus (2012) states that the using of magnetic board motivates students' attention and involves students to be active mentally and physically.  additional data. Data analysis techniques used were data reduction. It is the activities of selection, simplification and transformation data of field note results.

METHODOLOGY
The validity and reliability of data was examined by using triangulation techniques and member check. Triangulation is a combination of various data collection techniques and sources that already exist. In this study, triangulation was carried out by observation, interviews and field notes. While the member check was done by repeating the outline that was revealed by the informant at the end of the interview to ensure the data obtained, and to correct the errors or deficiencies.

Research Description
The results of this study were obtained from pre-cycle, cycle I and II. The results of Pre-Cycle activities are the students' English vocabulary achievement before the research actions being taken. The aim was to find out the initial conditions of students' English vocabulary achievement.

Pre-Cycle Activity
To see the students' vocabulary mastery, they were pretested. The students were given multiple choice test. There were 30 questions. by using several narrative text stories.
The result of Pre-Cycle can be seen in table 2. The analysis can be seen in the following table: The results showed that there were no student in very good and good category, 7 students (18%) in the sufficient category, 19 students (50%) in the poor category, and 12 students (32%) in the very poor category. Thus, the Cycle-I action was needed to improve their speaking ability by using magnetic board media.

Description of Cycle-I
Cycle-I action was done in two meetings. Each meeting consisted of 2 x 35 minutes.
In this Cycle, the planning of implementing Magnetic board was conducted.
The results can be seen in table 4. The analysis can be seen in the table 5: The results showed that there was still no student in very good category. But there are 4 students (10.5%) in good categories. It increased compared to the results of pre-cycle that was no student in good category. There was an increase in the sufficient category from 7 to 16 students. There were decreases in poor category from 19 to 14 students, and very poor category from 12 to 4 students. The results showed that there has been an increase on students vocabulary achievement but it was not significant yet. The average 67.84 were still under the minimum average (70). And the students who got completeness were still 53%, it means that there were 47% students were not complete. Therefore, this study should be continued to Cycle-II as an advanced stage of cycle-I by planning the things to be improved.

Description of Cycle-II
This Cycle is a revision of previous cycle. The things that need to be improved for this Cycle are about the students were asked to be find and arrange then pin the letters to the magnetic board according to the picture given. Thus, the learning process became more interesting and gave experience to students. So, the long term memory increased. The results of student learning activities in Cycle II can be seen in the table 6.  The table showed that there was a change, there were 3 students (8%) in very good category. There was an increase from 4 to 19 students in good category. There were decreases in category of sufficient (16 to 11 students), poor (14 to 5 students), and vey poor (4 to 0 student). The average increased from 67.84 to 76.76. And there was a significant increase on the students' completeness results. The completeness result percentage of students' in pre-Cycle, Cycle-I, and Cycle -II can be seen in the table 8.

CONCLUSION
Based on the results of the study, the using of magnetic board media can improve the students' vocabulary achievement. There was 69% increase after using the magnetic board media. In the initial condition, the percentage of students' completeness was only 18%. In the first cycle, the percentage of students' completeness scores increased to 53%, then in the second cycle has a significant increase to 87%. Thus, results of the study show that the percentage of students' completeness scores between the initial conditions and the first cycle and the second cycle has increased. In addition, the class average has increased too from 62.89 in pre-Cycle, 67.84 in Cycle-I, and 76.76 in Cycle-II. Moreover, in the teaching learning process using magnetic board media, the students' motivation increased and they got long term memory. Thus, it was concluded that the use of magnetic board media improve the students' vocabulary achievement, long term memory, and motivation.