Improving Students’ Vocabulary through Communicative Language Teaching (CLT) in Great Aceh

Purpose: This study examines the enhancement of vocabulary among third-grade students at one of SMPN (Junior High Schools) in Great Aceh by utilizing the Communicative Language Teaching (CLT) approach. The primary objective of this study is to determine the notable disparity in students’ vocabulary when employing the CLT method.

Methods: The target population consists of all third-grade students at SMPN, class IX-2 serving as the experimental group and class IX-4 as the control group. Fifty-three students were randomly selected to participate, 26 in the experimental and 27 in the control classes. Data was collected through a pre-test and post-test using two comprehension tests and implementing three techniques: experimental teaching, tests, and a questionnaire. The test comprised 25 questions, including 13 multiple-choice and 12 fill-in-the-blank items, while the questionnaire consisted of 10 Likert Scale questions. The data were analyzed using the t-test in the SPSS program and a statistical formula.

Results: The findings showed that the utilization of the CLT method led to an improvement in students’ vocabulary.

Conclusion: The analysis indicated that when comparing the results of the two tests, the difference between the control class (8.22) and the experimental class (51.23) demonstrated a significant enhancement. Furthermore, the t-test analysis revealed that the value of 0.05 (a = 5%) was more significant than the t-result (0.000), confirming the acceptance of the alternative hypothesis (Ha).