61 spoke Indonesian and Javanese, surprisingly, some students performed their
speech in Chinese, Korean, Italian, German, and Russian. The research was conducted in the second semester in the 20152016
Academic Year. The observations were done in October to November 2015 while the actions were conducted on January 21
st
, 2016 to March 3
rd
, 2016. The actions were carried out based on the school schedule. The actions completed were 6
meetings in total. They were conducted every Thursday on the two last hour session. The research used the English as a compulsory subject session. Actually
the time allocated to every teaching and learning session was 45 minutes per hour. However because there was a school policy regarding to BBE in the morning as
the beginning of the school activity, the session was reduced to 40 minutes per session. As the impact, the hour for teaching English as a compulsory subject
became 80 minutes only per week.
B. Research Design
In relation to the objective of the research which was to improve the students’
speaking skills through the use of pre-communicative and communicative activities, this research employed the action research AR design.
In this research, Kemmis and McTaggart spiral model of AR was used. Their model is reflected in the following figure.
62
Figure VII: The action research spiral model proposed by Kemmis and McTaggart
According to Kemmis and McTaggart 1988 in Burns 2010 AR typically involves four broad phases in a cycle of research. The first cycle may become a
continuing, or iterative, spiral of cycles which recur until the action researcher has achieved a satisfactory outcome and feels it is time to stop.
Burns 2010 states that action research is a part of broad movement that has been going on in education generally for some time. It is related to the idea of
reflective practice and the teacher as researcher. It involves taking a self- reflective, critical, and systematic approach to exploring
teachers’ own teaching contexts. Problematizing means taking an area we feel could be done better,
subjecting it to questioning, and then developing new ideas and alternatives. In AR, a teacher becomes an investigator or explorer of his or her personal
63 teaching context, while at the same time, being one of the participants in it. The
main goal of AR is to identify a problematic situation or issue that the participants--who may include teachers, students, managers, administrators, or
even parents--consider worth looking into more deeply and systematically. The term problematic does not mean that the teacher is an incompetent teacher. The
point is that, as teachers, we often see the gaps between what is actually happening in our teaching situation and what we would ideally like to see
happening. Carr Kemis 1986:220 in Burns 2010 defines action research as a self-
reflective enquiry undertaken by participants in order to improve the rationality and justice of their own social or educational practices as well as their
understanding of these practices and the situations in which these practices are carried out.
Burns in Cornwell 1999:5 in Burns 2010 defines action research as a self- reflective, systematic and critical approach to enquiry by participants who are at
the same time members of the research community. The aim is to identify problematic situations or issues considered by the participants to be worthy of
investigation in order to bring about critically informed changes in practice. AR is underpinned by democratic principles in that ownership of change is invested in
those who conduct the research Madya 2011 identifies that AR directly relates to the practice in the real
world in a natural situation. The subject is the researcher himself and the direct users of the research results. It is intended to result changes in the research
64 members and the changing of situation in the research setting to reach the practice
betterment incrementally and continually.
C. Research Subjects
