Abstract:
English as an important subject in our country, students are hoped to have competence in English and they should be master it. To master English, the students have to master grammar because grammar is the basic of English. In teaching grammar, especially subject-verb agreement, it is important for teacher to determine teaching technique. Using Substitution Drill is one of technique to teach grammar easily to interest the students and to make them memorize the rules easily. The objective of this study is to find out whether or not the use of substitution drill technique is able to improve students’ ability in understanding subject-verb agreement at the seventh grade students of SMP N 12 Purworejo in the academic year 2013/2014.
The type of this research is experimental research. The number of the sample is 62. As the experimental group, the researcher uses class VII F which consists of 31 students. Meanwhile as control group, the researcher takes 31 students of class VII C. The sampling technique which is used is purposive sampling. The instrument that used to collect the data is a test. The form of the test is divided into two parts. Those are pre-test and post-test. To analysis the data, the researcher used t-test formula.
The result of the research finds that the mean score of pre-test in experimental group is 60.87 and the mean score of post-test is 82.87. While the mean score of pre-test in control group is 59.90 and the mean score of post-test is 65.23. Then the value of t-test is 9.093 and the t-table is 2.00. The result of computation shows that t-value is higher than t-table; that is 9.093 > 2.00 so it can be stated that the hypothesis “substitution drill technique to improve students’ ability in understanding subject-verb agreement is effective” is accepted.
