Improving students’ vocabulary mastery through crossword puzzle at the first grade of SMPN 14 Bandarlampung

The objective of this research is to find out whether there is a significant difference in the students’ vocabulary mastery before and after being taught through crossword puzzles and also to find out which content of word that improves the most. The study was quantitative research which used one group pre-test and post-test design. The population of this research was 337 students of the first-grade students of SMPN 14 Bandar Lampung in the academic year 2018/2019. The subject is consisting of 155 male students and 182 female students. The average age of first-grade students is 12 years old. The sample of this research was taken randomly. The class of VII F is chosen as the sample of this research and the class consists of 31 students. A vocabulary test was used to collect the data. The result of students’ vocabulary test was measured in terms of noun, verb, adjective, and adverb. The data were analyzed by using the Repeated Measures t-test (SPSS) in which the significance was determined by p< 0.05. The result of this research shows that the value of significance is 0.000. It means that H1 is accepted and H0 is rejected since the p score is lower than 0.05. Based on the result, it can be concluded that there is a significant difference of the students’ vocabulary mastery before and after being taught through a crossword puzzle. Furthermore, the finding also shows that noun has the highest gain with a percentage of 35%. The mean of the noun in the pretest score is 22.1 and the mean of the noun in the posttest score is 26.4. From the explanation above, a crossword puzzle is recommended to be applied in teaching and learning vocabulary since the result shows a positive effect on students. Keywords: vocabulary, content words, crossword puzzle