| This study is aimed to investigate the effectiveness of word map exercise for teaching vocabulary to the first year junior high school students at SMP Kristen Yusuf. The subjects of this study were 84 students. A vocabulary pre-test was given to the subjects before the treatment to check whether or not they had already known the target words. Afterwards, 20 target words were taught by using the word map exercise, and the other 20 target words were taught by using regular exercise. The same test was given to the subjects after the treatment to know which exercises (the regular or word map) could help the subjects to memorize the target words better. The results revealed significant differences between the word map exercise treatment and the regular exercise treatment. The results of this study, based on the statistical analysis, indicated that word map exercise can help the subjects memorized the target words better than regular exercise. This means that using the word map exercise is more effective than the regular exercise, in order to help the first year junior high school students to memorize the target words. |