In English, there are many activities which happen every time. Those activities are divided into three main parts; present activities, past and future. Those activities in English it are called tenses. There are four fundamental tenses in English; the present tense, the past tense, the future tense, the past future tense. One of the important components in tenses is past tense. When the researcher did the program in SMP N 4 BAE Kudus the researcher realize that the students of that school especially the seventh grade students of that school are still confuse about simple past tense. Frequently, the students are still difficult to differentiate which one that called by regular verb and irregular verb. Because, the simple past has some different patterns to produce the words, like in affirmative, in negative, and in interrogative.
The objectives of the research is to test significance of the difference between the mastery of simple past tense of the 7th grade students of SMP N 4 BAE Kudus in academic year 2012/2013 before and after being taught by Using Words Cube.
The researcher uses quantitative research to find out the answer from the statement of the problem. Here the researcher used achievement test, by using written test. The students do the essay test with turn the cubes and make sentences with their own words.
The mastery of simple past tense of the seventh grade students of SMP N 4 Bae Kudus in academic year 2012/2013 before being taught by using words cube is categorized as fair. The researcher found that the highest score is 66 and the lowest score is 43. The score of mean is 55, 03 and standard deviation is 5, 70. Meanwhile, the mastery of simple past tense of the seventh grade students of SMP N 4 Bae Kudus in academic year 2012/2013 after being taught by using words cube are 77, 73 and 5, 61. The researcher found that the t-observation (t0) is higher than the t-table (tt), At the end of the calculation, we found that t0 (t-obtained) is 6, 56 and in the level of significance (α) 0, 05 and the degree of freedom (df) 29 t-critical is 2.045.
In conclusion, t0 falls in the critical region, the H0 which states that, “there is no significant difference of the mastery of simple past tense of the seventh grade students of SMP N 4 BAE Kudus in Academic year 2012/2013 before and after being taught by using words cube”, is denied. Therefore, the research hypothesis (H1) is accepted. It means “there is a significant difference of the mastery of simple past tense of the seventh grade students of SMP N 4 BAE Kudus in Academic year 2012/2013 between before and after being taught by using words cube” (t-observation = 6, 56> t-table 2.045
