The background of the study in this research is the students are usually afraid of studying English. They have difficulties in remembering new vocabulary and they are confused of understanding the new word. Because, English is one of the lesson that was introduced to students at fourth grade in the elementary school. In this study, the teacher still uses conventional methods, the teacher only translates the word and give monoton method. So, the students are easy to get bored. To improve students’ understanding, teachers can use puppet as a medium in teaching learning process. Because, puppet can help the teacher to motive students’ interest, understanding and enjoyment in following the lesson.
The problem of this research can be stated as follow are: How is the implementation of using puppet to improve students’ understanding on concrete nouns? And how is the effectiveness using puppet to improve students’ achievement on concrete nouns?
The objective of this study are (1) to describe the implementation of using puppet to improve students’ understanding on concrete nouns, (2) to find out the effectiveness of using puppet to improve students’ achievement on concrete nouns.
The design research that used a classroom action research with the reason the teacher can develop and repair their skills in giving the material to the students. The study was conducted at SDN 04 Dongos Kedung Jepara in the Academic Year 2009/2010. The subject of this study was the student of fourth grades in class. There were 42 students (25 boys and 17 girls). There were two steps in conducting this research. The first step was the pre-cycle, the teacher used conventional method and she did not use a puppet. The second step was the three cycles. In the cycle 1, the teacher performed a puppet about things around us. In the cycle 2, the teacher performed the puppet about animal. And the cycle 3, the teacher performed a puppet about fruits. During teaching learning process in three cycles in a classroom action research, the teacher introduced the words in differences activities that represented by puppet. The techniques which were used to collect the data are observation, test, and documentation.
Based on the data analysis, the result of this research showed the improvement of the students’ achievement on English concrete nouns. It can be seen from their score. The average on pre-cycle was 61.31, cycle 1 was 69.52.cycle 2 was 74.75, and cycle 3 was 79.76
The researcher can conclude from the result of the analysis that the use of puppet can be alternative way to teach vocabulary, especially to improve students’ mastery on concrete nouns. This result hopefully would motive English teachers to use a puppet in teaching English in the classroom, especially when teaching English to elementary students.