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Friday, July 26, 2013

Providing The Authentic Media For Enriching Student's Vocabulary



In a language, there will be a lot of components that the speaker should be fulfilled in order to transfer a meaningful massage to the audience. One of the cores of the language component is vocabulary. In teaching English as a foreign language, teachers must introduce new words to the students. This is unavoidable activities in teaching a foreign language. However, if the strategy in teaching vocabulary is not conducted in such a correct and interesting manner, the result will tend to lead the students to memorize the words and later on will cause stress and not enjoyable learning toward the students. It means each of the teachers should be creative and innovative enough. This is in line with Harmer (2008) that stated that when teaching vocabulary the major part in this process is the art of the language teachers’ his or her herself. Students need to see the words in context to see how they are use in the process of interaction.
Since the role of vocabulary according to Richard and Renandya (2002) is as a core component of language proficiency and provides much of the basis for how well learners speak, listen, read and write, so that based on Indonesian curriculum teaching vocabulary should be integrated in the process of learning which based on curriculum based competence. In other words, any kind of strategy and media in achieving the goal of vocabulary mastery should be provided properly by all language teachers.
Harmer (1991) also said that there are still many problems in teaching vocabulary. One of the problems that usually faced by teachers is how to select what words to teach. Somehow teachers have to make sense of huge list and reduce it to manageable proportions for the learners. This thing can be achieved by creating or using such a good or even authentic media that providing vocabulary in various ways.

2.  Strategies and media in teaching vocabulary
In recent years, there are so many teaching vocabulary media that have been created in order to fulfill the students’ need. Harmer (2008) mentions such ways and media in teaching vocabulary such as, word circle, word map, in the queue, vocabulary games and so on. However, realize or not all of those kind of vocabulary ways and media will cannot practically used outside of the classroom and if it is happened the continuity, applicable and enjoyment of the vocabulary will be lack and cause less effectiveness in teaching learning process. In other words, all teachers need media of teaching vocabulary that can be used and gotten by the learner in any places, any time and can be learnt with anybody.

Moreover, through this paper the writer tries to stimulate all of the people whom are concern to the development English education, to see the phenomena that are occurred in our nation and the impact of any kind of recent issues and development toward the improvement of education quality. One of the movements in our country in recent year is the development of foods industries. There are many kinds of instant products are produced in order to fulfill the needs of modern people who need practicality in any part of life, including food. Based on these reasons the food industries develop many ways to compete and win the competition in the market. One of the ways is by making the foods to be more endured and to keep them hygienist. The foods industrialist try to figure out a way by wrapping the food not only safely and healthy but also attractive to all level of the consumers weather domestic or overseas, informative and reliable in any situation. One of the commercial foods wraps offer to get those goals is by using English in their warping products. It can be found in the information of the ingredient, nutrition contain information table, serving procedure, or even in the brand and the jargon of the brand itself. This strategy besides providing a good facilitation to give information about anything that consumers need in the product, but also to attract and get the marketing field in all level of community either layman or educated and domestic consumers or overseas.
Almost in all kinds of foods that is produced or commercialized in Indonesia use English in their wrapping products. This fact grows so fast and there is something that all of English teachers should pay attention and takes it as one of a big change to be adapted in the field of their professional field. The other fact that should be concerned is the rates of the consumers of commercial foods. Herbawati (2008) says that the increasing of instant foods and snack in Indonesia in recent years, is one of the factors that stimulate the government to put foods snacks and instant food industries as one of national development industries priority. This fact is also supported by the other evidence that children around age 5-18 are the most potential market that consumes these products in their daily life, such as, chocolate, candy, bread, instant noodle, soft drink, snack, etc. It means students will play important role as the main consumers of commercial food products which are mostly package in many kinds of wrapping systems which also use English as the important part of their wrapping products. So that, this situation can lead the teachers to realize that how close and continuously used commercial food wraps are. Those are also using English instead of Indonesian in each of their wrapping products. It is clearly can be applicable and continuously authentic media that can be used anytime, anywhere and with anybody by students. This idea will directly lead the teachers to solve the fact that teachers still lack of media that can provide such these facilities to serve the students need in learning language naturally.

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