ISC Paper Template in A4 (V1) Journal of Education, Teaching, and Learning Volume 5 Number 2 September 2020. Page 388-392 p-ISSN: 2477-5924 e-ISSN: 2477-8478 388 Journal of Education, Teaching, and Learning is licensed under A Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International License. AN EVALUATION OF THE USE OF FLASHCARD FOR TEACHING VOCABULARY AT KINDERGARTENS IN SINTANG Henry Elisa 1) , Tuti 2) 1) STKIP Persada Khatulistiwa, Sintang, Indonesia E-mail: henryelisa.edu@gmail.com 2) STKIP Persada Khatulistiwa, Sintang, Indonesia E-mail: tutiidris10@gmail.com Abstract. Vocabulary plays an important role in determining the students’ ability for speaking because it is basic before children can produce words. Therefore, the teacher needs media as a tool to introduce those words to their students in the classroom. Flashcards is one of the media usually used by teachers at kindergartens in the Sintang Regency for teaching vocabulary for young learners. This research aims to evaluate the effects of using flashcard media for teaching vocabulary and identify the teachers’ responses towards the use of flashcard media for teaching vocabulary at kindergartens in Sintang Regency, West Kalimantan. This descriptive research qualitative research as an evaluation study is designed to explore the effects of the media on the students and teachers’ perspective. The data in this research were gathered through questionnaires with fifty-one participants and a semi-structured interview with five participants in Sintang Regency. The data analysis techniques used scale Likert in order researchers know how the use of flashcards by the teachers. The study’s results revealed that teachers believe that using flashcards is essential for teaching vocabulary to young learners. Thus, the teachers have various flashcards that can be applied for teaching vocabulary to young learners, for using colourful flashcards with different sizes. It is expected that this research gives references and knowledge for the kindergarten teachers who teach young learners so they could use the same media but with different types of flashcards types. Keywords: Flashcards; Teaching Media; Teaching Vocabulary; Vocabulary; Kindergarten I. INTRODUCTION Teaching vocabulary is one of the teaching activities at Kindergarten. Various vocabularies can be taught to the students such as parts of the body, animals, family members, etc. The teacher should be able to choose appropriate vocabularies that are going to be taught for them. The vocabularies must be useful for the students after they have learnt. So, the vocabularies that they have learnt in the classroom will help them in communicating with people in their environments such as in their family, with neighbours and also in other public places. In choosing the vocabularies, the teacher should decide the kind of vocabulary such as productive vocabulary that is the set of words that an individual can use when writing or speaking. They are words that are well-known, familiar, and used frequently by people in daily communication. Conversely, receptive, or recognition, vocabulary is that set of words for which an individual can assign meanings when listening or reading them in their daily communication. From a preliminary observation which had done at kindergartens in Sintang Regency. The researchers found that they have different abilities in vocabulary mastery. This condition should be overcome. Therefore, the researchers tried to interview groups B teachers at the kindergarten to get brief preliminary information about the kinds of media which are using by them in teaching vocabulary. One of the media used for teaching vocabulary is flashcard. This media is used to help the students to know and understand the meaning of vocabularies. There are some researchers which have been conducted related to the use of flashcard for teaching vocabulary. Firstly, the research of using flashcard media was conducted by Taghizadeh, Vaezi, and Ravan (2017) through their study to find the effect of this media on the students’ vocabulary knowledge of Iranian preschoolers. Based on the results of the research, the use of flashcard as one of the media in teaching http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/ mailto:henryelisa.edu@gmail.com mailto:tutiidris10@gmail.com Journal of Education, Teaching, and Learning Volume 5 Number 2 September 2020. Page 388-392 p-ISSN: 2477-5924 e-ISSN: 2477-8478 389 vocabulary for preschooler’ students had positive effects on their English vocabulary knowledge. Secondly, Herlina and Dewi (2017), through their classroom action research to develop the students‟ understanding of English vocabulary. The result of data obtained on the action of learning vocabulary has shown an increase in understanding. This research aims to evaluate the effects of using flashcard media for teaching vocabulary and identify the teachers’ responses towards the use of flashcard media for teaching vocabulary at kindergartens in Sintang Regency, West Kalimantan. This research is different from previous studies because researchers only focus on the effect and response of the teachers towards the use of flashcards. II. LITERATURE REVIEW A. Teaching Vocabulary Vocabulary is one of the core components in teaching language. This statement is supported by Hatch and Brown (1995) who said, “Vocabulary is the foundation to build languages, which plays a fundamental role in communication”. It describes that by mastering vocabulary; people can express their ideas and understand the other basic competence well. Laufer in Khodareza and Komachali (2012) also stated that vocabulary learning is at the heart of language learning and language use. As the result, Vocabulary makes the essence of a language this means that one can learn the language without know vocabulary. Language teaching specialists generally agree that vocabulary is one of the most important aspects for foreign language learners to acquire since it is critical in conveying the meaning of a message. Teaching English vocabulary by using flashcards as media does improve the students’ vocabulary mastery (Widiastuti, 2014) in line with that Annisa (2013) suggested the teachers need to help students to provide before presenting meaning or form of vocabulary items, teachers need to notice some considerations such as the type of the vocabulary, the students’ level and characteristics, and also the value of the techniques for the learners. Cameron (2011) also emphasizes children seek attention and purpose in what they see other people doing, bringing their knowledge and experience to their attempts to make sense of other people action and language. Many studies have addressed the role of word meaning in L2 vocabulary learning. Besides, teachers suggested using the real objects technique as often as possible when presenting vocabulary to young learners especially when the words are concrete. Young learners can be easy to remember words when the teacher uses gesture, pictures, and realia. An easy way to comply with the conference paper formatting requirements is to use this document as a template and simply type your text into it. B. Teaching Media According to Richard & Schmidt (2010), media is a general term for television, radio and newspapers considered as a whole and as ways of entertaining or spreading news or information to a large number of people language teaching, teaching materials which involve the use of different kinds of media such as visual and printed media are sometimes known as multimedia or mixed media. He mentions some of the advantages of using media. Flashcard is one of the media in teaching and learning vocabulary is the use of flashcard. A flashcard is a cardboard consisting of a word, a sentence, or a simple picture it. Flashcard is perhaps worth mentioning at this point, even though they are not only words but can be words and pictures. However, being used similarly as picture flashcard, they can often enrich the lesson. On top of that, those two can be indeed combined and applied together. Taghizadeh and Ashoori (2011) investigated the effects of using flashcards and word lists on EFL students‟ learning of foreign language vocabulary. The result of their study indicated that there is no significant difference in the efficiency of flashcard compared to word lists and also offered partial support to the hypothesis that flashcard could lead to better learning than word lists. As the above literature review indicates, research on the effectiveness of using flashcard in the teaching and learning process is limited. Whether flashcards can be used to positively facilitate teaching and learning vocabulary remains to be studied. Eslahcar (2012) point out, flashcard can be a fun, colourful, and creative way to aid in memory and retention of vocabulary words. Flashcards are a tried and tested teaching and learning device inside and outside the classroom, for young learners and adults alike. Aspects that must be implemented by teachers is the ability to pack good learning media in the learning activities of students. One of the media that can be applied is flashcard media. Flashcard is practical and applicable media, this media is used as a visual media in the pouring messages and symbols of communication (Herlina, 2017). Whether flashcard can be used to positively facilitate teaching and learning vocabulary remains to be studied. Flashcard is a sort of card which had been developed to store information. The information which is of greater importance can be easily stored on the flashcard as its primary purpose is to store the information for the easy of the people (Amalia, 2018). Haycraft and Cross in Nugroho, Nurkamto, and Sulistyowati (2012) that the flashcards can be arranged to create a logical grouping of target words which assist learners in memorizing words easier. According to Richard and Schmidt (2010), flashcards is economical, the teacher no need to buy a set of cards yet they can create by themselves. It is also handy and efficient, the students can bring it everywhere. Here are the examples of flashcard; 1) Big Picture Flashcard Big picture flashcard is very hopeful tools in presenting and drilling forms of new words since they draw learners‟ attention and make these often boring activities more enjoyable and that is exactly what teachers need when presenting new language to teach their learners‟ full attention. 2) Small Picture Flashcard Plenty of variations of these cards are typically applied in communicative activities in pairs or small groups of Journal of Education, Teaching, and Learning Volume 5 Number 2 September 2020. Page 388-392 p-ISSN: 2477-5924 e-ISSN: 2477-8478 390 students, thus finding a meaningful role in reviewing and practising vocabulary. 3) Words Flashcard Usually, flashcard grouped appropriates with their varieties, for example, a group of picture family, animals, vegetables, etc. Flashcards used for all content of the class. A teacher usually uses flashcard by holding them then shows them quickly to the students. III. METHODOLOGY A. Participants The study was conducted at Kindergarten in Sintang, West Kalimantan. Participants in this study were the teachers at the Kindergartens in Kecamatan Sintang. They were principals and group B’ teachers, all of them have been teaching at the kindergartens for a few years. All the participants were selected from the online data of the kindergartens’ lists in the Ministry of Education and Culture website; if the participants initially interested in taking part an online meeting was arranged where they could be fully briefed regarding the requirement of the study. All participants data were collected from June to July 2020. A total of sixty-four teachers were listed as the participant and fifty-one agreed to take part (79.68% positive response). They took part in this study by filling in the online questionnaires and interview through voice call. To help some participant who got a problem in operating their devices to fill the online questionnaire, the researchers asked their assistants to meet the participants directly and help them to fill the questionnaires or give them manual questionnaires. B. Design An evaluation study was carried out with the primary aim to evaluate the effects of using flashcard media for teaching vocabulary and to identify teachers’ responses towards the use of flashcard media for teaching vocabulary at kindergartens in Sintang Regency, West Kalimantan. To get the data in this research, the researchers used questionnaires and semi- structured interviews. The questionnaires were given to the participant to get the data about the teachers’ response toward the use of flashcards. Then, the data were displayed in the form of diagrams to see the percentage of the teachers’ response. C. Procedure The researchers decided to conduct the study because they were interested to evaluate the effects of using flashcard media for teaching vocabulary and identify teachers’ responses towards the use of flashcard media for teaching vocabulary at kindergartens in Sintang Regency, West Kalimantan. From a preliminary study conducted in Sintang, West Kalimantan and interview with the head of the Indonesian Kindergarten Teacher Association of Sintang Regency. Then, the researchers decided to choose the Kindergarten’ teachers in Sintang, West Kalimantan as the participants in this research. Because of the Covid-19 pandemic impacts that make the teachers must do work from home, the data collection for this research must be done online. So the online questionnaires were given to the participants. For some teachers who got a problem in operating their devices to answer the questionnaires, they were helped by the researchers’ assistants who came to the participants’ place directly by keeping obey the standard of covid-19 healthy protocol. To confirm the data gathered by the questionnaires, the researchers conducted a semi-structured interview. The data analysis techniques researchers use in this researcher was scale Likert. It was done by four steps such as editing, coding, scoring tabulating the data into excel after that the needed data researchers need input to SPSS. From the SPSS the researchers got the final result. IV. RESULTS AND DISCUSSION A. Results 1) The effects of flashcards as teaching media The use of flashcards for teaching vocabulary to the students at kindergartens during the process of teaching and learning. It can help to develop the students’ ability in learning vocabulary which can be seen in Table II to Table VI. The data were analyzed using SPSS, the number of participants who took part in this study can be seen in Table I. TABLE I THE NUMBER OF RESPONDENTS Questionnaires Respondents Valid Missing X1.1 51 51 0 X1.2 51 51 0 X1.3 51 51 0 X1.4 51 51 0 X1.5 51 51 0 X2.1 51 51 0 X2.2 51 51 0 X2.3 51 51 0 X2.4 51 51 0 X2.5 51 51 0 Table I shows there are 51 respondents which answered the questionnaires. TABLE II LEARNING INTERACTIVITY Valid Frequency Percent Valid Percent Cumulative Percent S 42 82.4 82.4 82.4 SS 9 17.6 17.6 100.0 Total 51 100.0 100.0 Table II indicates the result of questions 1. Learning more interactive (N51, there are 82.4% agree and 17.6% strongly agree). Table III reports the result of questions 2. Students are more easily grasp the vocabulary that is being taught. For all participants (N=51), there are 74.5% of participants agree and 23.5% strongly agree. Table IV shows that students are more enthusiastic about learning. For all participants (N=51), there are 74.5% of participants agree and 23.5 participants strongly agree and only 2% of participants disagree. Journal of Education, Teaching, and Learning Volume 5 Number 2 September 2020. Page 388-392 p-ISSN: 2477-5924 e-ISSN: 2477-8478 391 TABLE III EASE OF UNDERSTANDING VOCABULARY Valid Frequency Percent Valid Percent Cumulative Percent TS 1 2.0 2.0 2.0 S 38 74.5 74.5 76.5 SS 12 23.5 23.5 100.0 Total 51 100.0 100.0 TABLE IV STUDENT ENTHUSIASM IN LEARNING Valid Frequency Percent Valid Percent Cumulative Percent TT 1 2.0 2.0 2.0 S 38 74.5 74.5 76.5 SS 12 23.5 23.5 100.0 Total 51 100.0 100.0 TABLE V EASE OF REMEMBERING VOCABULARY Valid Frequency Percent Valid Percent Cumulative Percent STS 1 2.0 2.0 2.0 TT 1 2.0 2.0 3.9 S 37 72.5 72.5 76.5 SS 12 23.5 23.5 100.0 Total 51 100.0 100.0 Table V reports the result of questions 4. Students find it easier to remember the vocabulary during the teaching and learning process. For all participants (N=51), there are 72.5% of participants agree and 23.5% strongly agree and only 2% strongly disagree. TABLE VI FOCUS ON LEARNING Valid Frequency Percent Valid Percent Cumulative Percent STS 1 2.0 2.0 2.0 TS 2 3.9 3.9 5.9 TT 4 7.8 7.8 13.7 S 40 78.4 78.4 92.2 SS 4 7.8 7.8 100.0 Total 51 100.0 100.0 Table VI reports the result of questions 5. The students are more focus during the learning process for all participants (N=51), there are 78.4% of participants agree and 7.8% neutral and only 3.9% disagree. 2) Teachers’ response toward the use of flashcards The kindergarten teachers have used flashcards as one of the teaching media in their classroom give a good response toward the implementation of the media. It was measured using a list of questionnaires, which represented the teachers’ response. the questionnaire was created using a Likert scale in which the teachers choose one of the given statements. The results of the questionnaire for each statement can be seen in Table VII to Table XI. TABLE VII SUITABILITY OF FLASHCARDS SIZE WITH CLASS SIZE Valid Frequency Percent Valid Percent Cumulative Percent TS 2 3.9 3.9 3.9 TT 2 3.9 3.9 7.8 S 40 78.4 78.4 86.3 SS 7 13.7 13.7 100.0 Total 51 100.0 100.0 Table VII reports the result of questions 2. Flashcards size is adjusted to the classroom size. For all teachers (N=51), their choice was 78.4% agree and 13.7% strongly agree. TABLE VIII FLASHCARDS ACCORDING TO SIZE CLASS Valid Frequency Percent Valid Percent Cumulative Percent TS 3 5.9 5.9 5.9 TT 6 11.8 11.8 17.6 S 24 47.1 47.1 64.7 SS 18 35.3 35.3 100.0 Total 51 100.0 100.0 Table VIII reports the result of questions 2. Flashcards are adjusted to the classroom size. The result showing for all teachers (N=51), their choice was 47.1% agree and 35.3% strongly agree and only 5.9% disagree. TABLE IX EASE OF MAKING FLASHCARDS Valid Frequency Percent Valid Percent Cumulative Percent TT 1 2.0 2.0 2.0 S 35 68.6 68.6 70.6 SS 15 29.4 29.4 100.0 Total 51 100.0 100.0 Table IX reports the result of questions 3. Flashcards are teaching media that can be made by the teacher easily. For all teachers (N=51), their choice was 68.6% agree and 29.4 % strongly agree and only 2% disagree. TABLE X EASE OF DOING FLASHCARDS Valid Frequency Percent Valid Percent Cumulative Percent TT 2 3.9 3.9 3.9 S 33 64.7 64.7 68.6 SS 16 31.4 31.4 100.0 Total 51 100.0 100.0 Table X reports the result of questions 4. Flashcards are easy to carry out. For all teachers (N=51), their choice was 64,7% agree and 31,4 % strongly agree and only 3.9 disagree. Journal of Education, Teaching, and Learning Volume 5 Number 2 September 2020. Page 388-392 p-ISSN: 2477-5924 e-ISSN: 2477-8478 392 TABLE XI THE ATTRACTIVENESS OF FLASHCARDS Valid Frequency Percent Valid Percent Cumulative Percent S 36 70.6 70.6 70.6 SS 15 29.4 29.4 100.0 Total 51 100.0 100.0 Table XI reports the result of questions 5. Flashcards are interesting in teaching media. For all teachers (N=51), their choice was 70,6% agree and 29.4,3 % strongly. None of them disagrees. B. Discussion Teaching media is crucial for all teachers especially kindergarten’s teachers’. This study was conducted to evaluate the use of flashcard for teaching vocabulary at kindergartens in Sintang, West Kalimantan. The result indicates that the teachers in teaching vocabulary need flashcard and it has a very big impact on the students in learning vocabulary. It in line with Widiastuti’s research. She said Teaching vocabulary by using flashcard as media does improve the students master. Yet, the teacher must pay attention to the size of the flashcards, it must be adjusted to the size of the classroom. As we could see that the participant response in table 8. Almost fifty percent of participants strongly agree about this. The teachers must be creative in making the size of the card as well. The impact of flashcard not only in students are enthusiastic in learning but also their memory is improved the literature support this view (Amalia, 2018). Haycraft and Cross in Nugroho, Nurkamto and Sulistyowati (2012) said that the flashcards can be arranged to create a logical grouping of target words which assist learners in memorizing words easier. Most of the participants have a positive response toward the use of the flashcard. Because it is practical and applicable media in teaching. V. CONCLUSION This research aims to evaluate the effects of using flashcard media for teaching vocabulary and identify the teachers’ responses towards the use of flashcard media for teaching vocabulary at kindergartens in Sintang Regency, West Kalimantan. From the result of the research, it is found that Flashcards are effective teaching media that could apply for teaching vocabulary to young learners in their classroom. During the process of teaching the teachers must be able to use flashcards effectively and it is needed the teachers’ creativity to design interesting flashcards. The colours, sizes and shapes. Flashcards have an impact on students’ ability to receive vocabularies in the learning process and increased the classroom atmosphere because the students were more enthusiastic. By using the flashcard, the students were enthusiastic and can be managed because they were focused on the teacher when the teacher showed flashcards to them while mentioning the name of the picture of it. So the researcher highly recommends to the teachers of kindergarten to use flashcard as a media in teaching vocabulary. ACKNOWLEDGEMENT We express sincere gratitude to the directorates of Research, Technology and Higher Education as the research funder in this research project. REFERENCES Amalia, T. Z. (2018). Flashcards in Language Area of Early Childhood Education. ThufuLA: Jurnal Inovasi Pendidikan Guru Raudhatul Athfal, 2(1), 111-126. Annisa, A. (2013) Techniques in presenting vocabulary to young EFL learners. Journal of English and Education, 1(1), 11-20. Badrujaman, Aip. (2009). Diktat Teori dan Praktek Evaluasi Program Bimbingan dan Konseling. Jakarta. Cameron, L. (2011). Teaching Language to Young Learners. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Eslahcar, M. (2012). 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