Improving Students’ Ability in Speaking Through Speaking Competition

Improving Students’ Ability in Speaking

Through Speaking Competition

In Indonesia, the teaching of English is generally started at the fourth grade of elementary school level and continued to the university level. However, currently there is a new trend that English is taught since the first grade of elementary school. Some or many more education institutions have even given English since the students were in the kindergarten level. The teaching of English in Indonesia, particularly at senior high school, aims to enable the students to use English for communication. To achieve this goal, the teaching of English is directed to develop the students’ competency in listening, speaking, reading, and writing. In particular, being able to speak English is important. This is because the ability to use the language in daily communication is the indicator that someone has mastered the language.

Most people, mastering the art of speaking is the single most important aspects of learning a second or foreign language and success is measured in terms of the ability to carry out a conversation in the language. Teaching speaking is not an easy task for English teachers. Teachers often face many constraints in teaching students how to speak well. The students are usually shy to express their feeling, ideas, or wishes. This may be caused by their being afraid of making mistakes, being laughed at by their classmates, or being criticized in the classroom. Another factor that could block the learners’ ability in speaking in motivation. This might be caused by the idea that English in Indonesia is a foreign language which is not used in daily communication.

Method

The design of action research consists of four steps: planning an action, implementing an action, observing, and reflecting.

1.      Planning the action

A lesson plan was made as a guideline before conducting the teaching activities. Formulating instructional objective is very important to decide before conducting the activity because it leads to the achievement of the objective of the study or the expected result of the teaching and learning. The instructional objective is based on the basic competence. In the study, the basic competence is asking and giving opinion and asking and giving agreement or disagreement of the situation given. The whilst-teaching stage was intended to implement the theory into practice. The post-teaching stage was intended to emphasize the students’ paradigm about speaking ability. The procedures of the teaching consist of three stages: pre-teaching, whilst-teaching and post-teaching stages. The pre-teaching stage was intended to activate the students’ background knowledge about the topic and recall the materials from the previous lesson.

2.      The Implementation of the Strategy

In the pre-teaching stage, the students were given the rules of the activities. The teacher also told them about the nature of speaking and the expression that they are going to practice. This activity always does when process of teaching is going on in everyday in class.

Results

The results of the data analysis were presented to answer the research question. It was presented in two categories: scores of the students’ performance and responses to the questionnaire. The former category was used to show the improvement of the students’ speaking skill, whereas the latter category was used to know the students’ opinions on the instructional activities conducted on the speaking competition basis.

Discussion

As pointed out earlier, communication is important in the teaching and learning a language. It means that the teaching of English by using a traditional method that focuses on grammar mastery should be avoided. The product of teaching should guarantee the learners on what they have mastered after the learning activities were completed. This is because success of learning a language is measured in terms of ability to carry out a conversation in the language. However, teachers should know how to develop the speaking ability of their students. They should also know what strategy is suitable with their students so that they can improve the speaking ability of the students.

The results of this study show that motivation is one of the key factors that drive the students to speak and the power of immediate reward is undeniable.

These factors influence the students’ mastery in speaking as the students were forced to produce understandable utterances although they still made grammatical mistakes. Errors are the sign of the language development and tolerable for the learners. Addition, it is important that the students be given feedback so that they could correct mistakes in their sentences. And because errors naturally happen to the learners, they should not be looked down.

Conclusion

The findings of the study confirm that speaking competition is effective to improve the students’ motivation and their speaking ability. It is recommended that teachers apply this strategy to improve the speaking ability of the students. Additionally, the students need to be motivated and given a useful and effective strategy so that their speaking ability can be improved. English teachers are suggested to apply the strategy especially in speaking class so that the teaching of English can be made more challenging and effective.