Improving Students’ Grammar and Pronunciation Accuracy

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3. Improving Students’ Grammar and Pronunciation Accuracy

Besides the discoveries of the four techniques which could be employed to improve the students’ grammar and pronunciation accuracy, the research also discovered how to improve the students’ grammar and pronunciation accuracy. The research discovered that appropriate techniques, attractive teaching aids, and positive feedback contributed to the improvement of the students’ accuracy. Appropriate task was closely associated with the children’s intellectual development. Since the children’s intellectual development was limited, the task should be appropriate for the children. The employment of the transformation drill and the chain drill in this research were proven failed to improve the students’ grammar and pronunciation accuracy. The employment of the substitution drill could improve the students’ accuracy because the tasks were appropriate in which the students were only required to substitute a part of the sentence. Based on the interview, the students thought that the substitution drill was easier than the transformation drill which required the students to transform a type of sentence to be another type of sentence. Therefore, the students’ grammar accuracy improved during the employment of this technique which also affected on the improvement of the pronunciation accuracy. The second aspect which contributed to the improvement of the students’ accuracy was attractive teaching aids. The writer incorporated audio-video media in this research. The incorporation of the audio-video material also played important roles in the improvement of the students’ accuracy. First, the audio- video material maintained the students’ attention alive. Since the students were 78 only interested on the here and now activity, exposing attractive teaching aids would grasp the students’ attention and curiosity. However, at the same time, the students were exposed to the real language use which certainly helped them to internalize patterns of language they learned. Second, the students’ intellectual development limited the students understanding on the actual use of language. The teacher could not explain linguistic concepts to the students. Attractive teaching aid facilitated and bridged the gap between the students’ intellectual limitation and linguistic explanation of a language. Finally, positive feedback also contributed on the improvement of the students’ accuracy. The writer concluded that reinforcement through positive feedback was very important. During the employment of the substitution drill, the writer noted whenever the students found difficulties the writer as a teacher always encouraged the students that they could do the task. As the result, the students’ self-esteem was also built. This positive self-esteem had driven the students to do better during the teaching learning activities in which also improved the students’ accuracy, both on the grammar and pronunciation. These discoveries certainly would bring about a change in the practice of language teaching. The following is the discussion of the implications based on the discoveries of the research.

B. Teaching Implications