Teaching Speaking to Junior High School
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comic strips is not only amuse and interest students but also it can be used as media in education.
In addition, he also suggests that there are some activities which can be implemented by using comic strips in language class, especially in speaking.
Combining with retelling story, the comic strips are arranged into disordered panel of comic strips. The students are asked to retell the comic strips after
completing the comic strips into proper sequence to tell the story in the form of speaking exercises. In a variation of this exercise, the teacher can remove the
speech or thought bubbles of the comic strips, copies of both the comic strips and the next of the bubbles to the students. The students’ task is to figure out the
proper order of the speech of thoughts. For the advanced learner, the tasks can be made more difficult by giving a
different panel to each student in group and asking students to describe to the rest of the group what is on their panels. The students should not show their picture to
each other until they have figured out the correct order for the panels. The other way of implementing comic strips is speaking is role-play. In
this activity, the teacher provides a comic strip from which the last panel is cut out. After that, the students are asked to continue the story and decide with an
ending by themselves. Actually, this activity similar to the first activity but the end of activity the students act out their stories in class, based on the character in
that comic.
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In conducting this research, the researcher refers to the Csabay’s explanation related to how to implement comic strips in teaching speaking. As the
effort to improve students’ speaking skill, the use of comic strips is applied in each stage of teaching technique, that is PPP Presentation, Practice, Production.
The comic strips are presented in the form of various tasks to stimulate and assist students in producing their spoken language.
The tasks that contain comic strips on the practice stage and production stage are designed as the information gap activity. On the practice stage, the
comic strips are in the form of pictures and bubbles with incomplete expressions or sentences that demand the students to complete it first and act them out
through role play. The random answers are available to this task. Meanwhile, on the production stage, the students do role play after arranging the disorder comic
strips and completing the blanks with appropriate answers. The available answers to these tasks are in the form of multiple choices.