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CHAPTER I INTRODUCTION
A. Background to the Problem
English curriculum contains four macroskills. Those are listening skill, speaking skill, reading skill, and writing skill. Those skills are related to
delivering and accepting of meaning. It means that students are expected to be able to accept and interpret meaning through listening and reading activities
and to convey and deliver meaning through speaking and writing activities. In practice, based on my limited observation, the teacher taught the
students for different main purposes of learning English. He focused on teaching written skills more than on teaching oral skills. In addition, teaching
grammar was emphasized more than any other language aspects. He drilled the students with many rules of language. Some students could understand in
the material but the rest of the students needed greater effort to do so. Teaching grammar to the students is a good way to make students
understand the structure of language. However, there is a need of meaningful and contextual activities to learn grammar for the students. Therefore,
contextual functional can be used. Functional language is able to enhance students’ communicative competence and cognition competence.
In addition, based on my limited observation about teaching and learning English in a school, the problems found in the classroom could be
summarized into some points.. Firstly, the teacher taught the students with
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written skills much more often. It reduced the opportunities of developing students’ oral skills. Consequently, the students discouraged themselves to
take risk of being mistaken, and finally they did not have sufficient opportunities to have practice of speaking English.
A basic problem which came from the teacher was that the teacher was now close to his retirement. From that point, we can see that the teacher has
worked for more than 30 years. It also reveals that his study was in 1970s where there was no communicative-language teaching approach being taught
to the student-teacher. Perhaps, when the teacher was a student-teacher in the meantime, he could only study grammar-translation method and audio-lingual
method. As a result, he applied his knowledge about teaching and learning of English from his study in the classroom. Those methods focus the learning
process on language items and features and put the meaning and the function of language behind. Although there were some education workshops for the
teachers to use communicative-language teaching approach in teaching their students, many teachers were not successful to apply their knowledge about
new approach in language teaching in the real practice of English instruction. Therefore, we should understand the class situation in which the teacher
teaches his students with grammar and other language features and items as the main points of the teaching.
Since grammar-translation method and audio-lingual method could not provide sufficient opportunities to develop oral skills, the students got
difficulty in performing their oral skills.. The following vignette shows the real situation in an English classroom at a school.
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Based on the limited interview on February 29, 2012, the students stated that if they wanted to say or ask something to their teacher in English,
they cancelled or, at least, postponed it. It was because they did not know exactly what expression should be used in order to ask their teacher.
Date : February 28, 2012 Time :
09.15-11.00 The teacher came to the class and said “Good morning” to the students. Just
after that, he directly reminded students of the last material they had learnt. He said to the students that in this day, students would continue the last
materials that were active and passive voice. Then, the teacher asked the students to open their books to have homework evaluation. However, he did
not ask the difficulties or barriers that students met when they did the homework. Next, the teacher sat down in his own seat next to the
blackboard and let his students talk with their friends out of classroom context. The class became a little bit noisy without any control from the
teacher. During the time, some students came to the front of the class to write down their work. Meanwhile the teacher took the roles of the students
to fulfil daily presence. When some students wrote their work in front of the class, the rest of the class did not do something meaningful related to the
English lesson. The result was that they ignored the materials and even they were able to walk around in the class without any clear purpose.
When the evaluation time was coming, together with the students and jointly the teacher assessed the works on the blackboard. However, the
teacher’s voice was not really clear neither was his explanation. The explanation was not deep too. Therefore, although the students paid
attention to the teacher’s explanation, most of them still looked confused but some students got the point the teacher delivered to.
After finishing the homework evaluation, the students were asked to continue their practice to do active and passive voice in the LKS. In
addition, the teacher rarely wrote down his explanation on the blackboard in order to make students easier to understand the materials.
In the second session, there was drilling activity. However, although the teacher actually wanted to teach speaking to the students about some
expressions, he tended to teach reading instead of speaking. There was no short-dialogue practice and role-play. But, he looked pay more attention to
the students’ utterance accuracy but forgetting the fluency and the meaningful learning.
After that drilling-activity-like, the students were asked one more to do some tasks from the LKS and the teacher left them to do the work by their
selves without observing students’ progress when they were doing the tasks.
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Sometimes they also realized that the teacher’s voice was not clear enough in terms of voice, pronunciation, and intonation. Furthermore, they said that
when they found problem during the lesson, they preferred to discuss it with their friends. The result was the students absorbed the lesson well.
Moreover, according to the observation and interview, students often had interaction with others to solve problems or to finish their task. Although
it was in their first language, it indicated they needed opportunity to cooperate with their friends to do their assignment, especially to solve difficult problem
and advance task. They used discussion that includes cooperation. They got confident when they had discussion with their friends, instead of doing a task
individually. It was potential situation in which students could have interaction and communication using English within group work to achieve
group’s goal. Moreover, they said that they liked having role plays too to train their speaking performance. They said that they felt safe and finally they were
aware about their responsibility as an individual as well as a team. Teaching speaking should be relevant with the needs of students so that
the learning process becomes meaningful. It can be achieved by providing activities that motivate students and give opportunities to students to actively
communicate with English. In order to solve the problems, the teacher and I had some discussions
to find solution from existing theories and journals, previous researches and observation, revealed finding for example ‘Cooperative Learning in An
English as A Second Language Classroom’ by Judith Grundman, and many other sources as the considerations. Finally, we chose cooperative learning in
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order to improve students’ speaking skill. This decision was based on some theoretical and empirical reasons proposed by some experts and researchers
in applied linguistics. In addition, cooperative learning is indeed able to increase the frequency of communication among the students as well as the
quality of their attitude in social relationship. It also implies that their level of confidence to speak English grows up.
We chose cooperative learning to improve students’ speaking skill based on some considerations. When conducting the observation, we saw that
the students worked with their friends. They could increase their level of interaction and communication. In addition, they did not think about the gap
within them in terms of both their speaking competence and performance so that they do not hesitate to speak English that was mixed with their L1. Since
emotionally they felt that they were almost in the same level of proficiency in English, they could encourage their selves and their teammates to speak
English. Cooperative learning also makes learners unconsciously learn to manage organization, have responsibility to their selves and their teammates,
negotiate idea through language, and other learning activities. By conducting this research, the teacher and I, as the researchers, hoped
that we could fix the problem since oral skills are essential parts in interaction and communication. It built my strong motivation; to produce students who
were able to use both oral and written English in balance and who feel free in expressing their idea. In addition, the research was aimed to improve the
student-teacher skill in teaching English.
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Therefore, to study the situation of the school, we conducted a research. The research was regarded as action research in which we tried to improve
speaking ability of students at SMA N 1 Muntilan in the academic year of 20122013.
B. Identification of the Problem
Speaking is one of the four language skills that students should acquire and develop besides reading, writing, and listening. However, practically,
speaking is not focused in line with writing, reading, and even listening. In the class, the teacher did not give sufficient opportunities to students to speak
English actively or at least stimulation so that students had motivation to express their ideas. It discouraged students to speak English actively.
In fact, it is not easy to speak English fluently and accurately. Even for the teacher himself, there were many hesitations when he spoke English. The
next problem was the gap between what was supposed to be and the reality. There was almost no real opportunity for the students to practice using
English in the classroom so they got confused to have interaction in English. Even if there were opportunities for the students, they were not distributed
equally. In order to create original English environment-like, students need
authentic input, suitable media and good classroom management. Therefore, the materials should represent the English itself. Using one or some course
books is allowed but it is not suggested to stick on a single course book in the whole meeting and even all meetings. The authentic and semi-authentic
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materials are the alternatives for teaching English. Authentic materials are not only motivating students to learn English but also introduce them to the real
use of English in real context. The problem is that the teacher never uses authentic materials so that the students only know English in terms of forms
and meaning from the course book. Therefore, their learning process is less meaningful and contextual.
The communicative purposes are the focus on recent English curriculum in Indonesia. It is of course that grammar and other linguistic
aspects are also included in the curriculum but they are not the main focus. The communicative purposes are covered with the contexts. The activities
should give more chances to students to communicate with other in English and even to cooperate with other in order to achieve the purposes and even
beyond it. Therefore the activities and tasks should be designed based on the communicative approach. It is said that linguistic form is part of a meaningful
speech. Pre-communicative activities should be conducted before communicative activities to teach the linguistic form. And the communicative
approach should be conducted to give students the real opportunities to use the linguistic form they have learnt within the real context.
In reality, the teacher tended to avoid teaching English which cope linguistic form, the meaning, and the context in balance. The teacher
emphasized on one side only; the linguistic form, but left behind the meaning and context.
However, in practice, the teacher’s role in the class was as a controller during the whole time class. The teacher did not manage the class, except
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asking the students to do the tasks by themselves over time to time. The tasks were in the form of written tasks. It meant that the teacher did not train the
students to have meaningful speech or interaction. The implication was there was no chance distributed to the students for having meaningful speech in
order to train their communicative competence and performance. The activities arranged by the teacher were to do task after task. There
was no activity, called pre-communicative activities, in order to begin the lesson and no activities, called communicative activity, which is the core of
the lesson. The students liked to have a kind of cooperation among students. If they
wanted to speak more actively, they wanted to do it as a team. It could be in the form of role play, discussion, and many other activities. However, the
teacher did not see it as a chance to improve students’ oral skills competence and performance. As the result, only some students who were naturally had
high level of confidence who were able to encourage themselves to speak English. But the rest of the students who had high inhibition hoped not to be
called or to get opportunity to speak English in the class individually. Materials and media are the supporting utilities for the teaching and
learning process. Without appropriate materials and media, the process of learning English cannot run well. The result was sometimes the objectives
could not be achieved. Fortunately, the available facilities helped the process of teaching and learning English.
In addition, time management is an important element that is able to determine the effectiveness of students’ learning. Without clear and
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