• Students had very poor English grammar. The use of basic language structures was inaccurate. Here is the example, “Can you help me to taking
the bucket?” Student number 4, field notes on October 22, 2007 • Poor pronunciation ability in speaking. Students pronounced k :ld for
the word “could” Student number 3, 6, 7, field notes on October 22, 2007.
• Poor speaking fluency. For example, students spoke with pauses such as “ehm…, apa…”
b. Action Planning
The researcher used an observation checklist or speaking rubrics to diagnose students’ speaking ability. Based on the result of the previous stage,
diagnosing, the researcher planned a technique to be implemented in order to improve the students’ speaking ability. The researcher decided to use cued-
dialogue as the first technique in the research. Here was the example of cued- dialogue used in the research.
Situation 1 Student A
Greets student B Asks for something he lost wallet
Describes the thing Says thank you
Student B Greets student A
Asks for the description of the wallet Says sorry
Figure 4.1 Cued-dialogue in Describing things
The reason why researcher used cued-dialogue was that this technique could help students to build topics to talk about, to enrich their vocabularies, to
increase their grammar mastery, and reduce pauses while speaking. Moreover, students had clues to conduct speaking activities. From the example of cued-
dialogue above, it can be seen that this technique gives students topic about describing thing. It provides the cues on how to conduct the conversation.
Students could conduct the dialogue without thinking what they should speak next. Littlewood 1981: 51 explains that the cues also enable learners to predict a large
proportion of what the other will say and to prepare the general list of their own response. In doing the activities, students worked in pairs. There were 15 students
in the class, so the researcher made six pairs and one group consisting of three students. The researcher chose them randomly to be partners in order to avoid
noise and grouping.
c. Action Taking
The researcher decided to use cued-dialogue to be implemented to the students to solve the problems. As mentioned before in the diagnosing stage, there
were four kinds of the problems. This technique was considered as the first technique used in this classroom action research. As soon as the technique was
chosen, the researcher wrote lesson plans and took action. During the teaching learning activities in the class the researcher observed and took notes on
everything which was considered significant and important related to the students improvement. The researcher conducted the first cycle using this technique in two
meetings. This aimed to make sure that researcher really wanted to know what kind of technique which was appropriate and not seemed as a trial only. In the
first meeting, the researcher taught about describing people. In the second meeting the researcher taught about describing things. The researcher explained about the
useful expressions and vocabularies related to describing people and things. Students worked in pairs and performed their activity in front of the class. Teacher
gave feedbacks on the students’ performances in the end of each role-play. This kind of technique aimed to help students to build topics to talk about, to enrich
their vocabularies, to mind their grammar mastery, and reduce pauses while speaking.
d. Evaluation
