Enriching Students’ Vocabulary Through Reading Short Story

English vocabulary has a very essential role in enabling students to master English. Students cannot read, speak, listen, and write without understanding the meaning of words. Therefore, English teacher needs to enrich students’ vocabulary efficiently and effectively. One of the methods that can be used to enrich students’ vocabulary is short story technique. For this reason, this study concerns on students’ vocabulary mastery that is taught by reading short story. This research aimed to investigate (1) the use of short story in enriching students’ English vocabulary of junior high school MTsS Mutha’alimin and (2) the students’ perception toward the use of short story in enriching their English vocabulary. Pre-experimental with one-group pretest-posttest design was applied. The data were collected by conducting test (pretest and posttest) and questionnaire. The population was third grade students of MTsS Mutha’alimin and the sample was Class IX B chosen through random sampling technique. The data of pretest and posttest were analyzed using t-test formula. The result revealed that tscore (8.22) is higher than ttable 2.064 (tscore > ttable). It means Ho is rejected and Ha is accepted. Thus, the use of short story can enrich the students’ English vocabulary at Class IX MTsS Mutha’alimin. In addition, from the students’ perception, it was revealed that they are happy studying vocabulary by using reading short story because they can get a lot of new vocabularies. They say that reading short story improve their ability in mastering vocabulary. Short story is able to make the students become enthusiastic in enriching their vocabulary in order to understand the whole story proven by their test score and questionnaire result. Then, teachers are recommended to actively encourage students to practice the words/vocabularies they learnt in classroom and outside classroom, unless the new words/vocabularies will be soon forgotten by the students.