TEACHERS' PERCEPTIONS ON THE USE OF GAMES IN TEACHING VOCABULARY TO JUNIOR HIGH SCHOOL STUDENTS

This study aims to find out how English teachers perceive the use of games in teaching vocabulary to students at the junior high school level and analyze the process of using games in teaching vocabulary. This research uses descriptive qualitative in which data is obtained from sentence texts. The data was collected by conducting observations and interviews with 3 English teachers at SMP Negeri 1 Pahae Jae. This study found that the three English teachers had positive perceptions which contained their satisfaction with the use of games as a media to teach vocabulary and negative perceptions which contained their dissatisfaction in using games to teach vocabulary in accordance with Robbin's (2017) theory. The positive perceptions of the three teachers are games add relaxation and fun, games engage and motivate students and games stimulate interactivity while their negative perceptions of games are limited resources to make the games and time constraints. The second finding in this study is that there are 3 processes in using games to teach vocabulary, namely organizing students into groups, explaining the game and giving instructions, and observing and monitoring students. as for the games used by the three teachers are different and adapted to the material in the student textbook. The three games are matching the sentence to the picture, word search puzzle and crossword puzzle.