English Community Journal (2017), 1 (1): 41–45 41 TEACHING VOCABULARY BY USING REALIA (REAL-OBJECT) MEDIA Dodi Irawan Lecturer at English Department Study Program, Tamansiswa University of Palembang dodotyupz88@gmail.com Abstrak English is one of scary subject for some students of Indonesia. The students feel afraid to speak in English because of their less word of vocabulary. Realia media is the one simple interesting media that may bring motivation for the student who afraid to study English. Teacher of English can use realia media and bring it in the class to get more attention, and participation of students. In this research, the writer try to focuses on how realia media make significant difference ability of vocabulary to the students. The reserach of this study used a quasi-experimental method the population of this research was taken from the seventh grade Students of SMP Negeri 23 Palembang in the academic of year 2015/2016. Based on the research, it found that there was a significance difference using Realia media in teaching vocabulary. From the result on this research, it was found that there is a significant difference in achievement before and after the treatment in experimental group. Keywords: vocabulary, realia (real-object) media. ©Pendidikan Bahasa Inggris FKIP UM Palembang p–ISSN 2549–9009 Introduction English is one of the most important languages in the world. It is not only used as an international language but also it is used to access the science and technology. Based on Brown (2000), language is a system of arbitrary conventionalized vocal, written, gesture symbol that enable members of given community to communicate intelligibly with one another; one of the aspects of language is vocabulary. Vocabulary is an important fundamental aspect, when the students learn a foreign language, especially English language (p. 5). The first thing we have to know is vocabulary.According to Hedge (2000) states that there is a lack of attention to vocabulary. In this case, learning about vocabulary topic is important mean to express out thought and feeling, either in spoken and written form (p.110-111). English vocabulary can help students to control their abilities in listening, speaking, writing, and reading. Nation (2002) affirms that vocabulary growth is such an important part of language acquisition that it deserves to be planned for, controlled and monitored (p. 267). In Indonesia, teaching English is a part of curriculum decree. Based on Education and Cultural Ministerial decree no. 58 year 2014 dated on July 2nd 2014 section 5 point 2 and 6 about curriculum 2013 for junior high school states that English language is as a local content that purpose to develop competence of attitude, competence of knowledge, and competence of ability of students as basic and affirmation ability in social, country and nation. Despite of the fact that vocabulary is very important, the students still face many problems in learning vocabulary. Based on Program Internal Students Assessment (PISA) (2012), the OECD’s reading of the students is 496, meanwhile, the mean score of students in Indonesia is 396 which is below the average of OECD. Furthermore, according to the pre-observation done by the writer in the seventh grade students in SMP Negeri 23 Palembang, the writers find some problems. First, the students find it difficult to spell, understand, and pronounce English words, one of the sample is when they learn about the word run, which had different spelling and same meaning and when they learn about plural, where the plural of box is boxes but the plural of ox is oxen, not oxen, The ability of communicative and creativity of English language teacher are important aspect to successful a studying activity in the classroom to the young