Teaching Speaking in Junior High School
observing is a kind of meaningful learning. Here, students and teachers are provided with objects, real objects, or phenomena. Students are directly involved in learning. It
helps teachers to contextualize students’ learning in the classroom. At the same time, students can learn based on what they see to construct their knowledge. It also
facilitates students to fulfill their need of knowing something. In this context, their curiosity will lead them to the construction of knowledge. Contextually is also
presented because students can connect what they have learned with what they are going to learn.
b Questioning
Suharyadi 2013 states that questioning can be used by both teachers and students in the classroom. A variety of purposes emerge from analysis of the
literature, including 1 to develop interest and motivate students to become actively involved in lessons, 2 to evaluate students’ preparation and check on homework or
seatwork completion, 3 to develop critical thinking skills and inquiring attitudes, 4 to review and summarize previous lessons, 5 to nurture insights by exposing new
relationships, 6 to assess achievement of instructional goals and objectives, and 7 to stimulate students to pursue knowledge on their own.
c ExperimentingExploring
To get the real or authentic learning, learners have to do experiments. For example, students should understand the concepts of science and its relation to
everyday life. Learnersmust have the skills to develop knowledge about the environment, and be able to use the scientific method and scientific attitude to solve
the problems they face in everyday life. The application of experimental methods is intended to develop various learning objectives, the attitudes, skills, and knowledge.
d Associating
The term “associating” refers to the ability to group diverse ideas and associate diverse events as experiences. When the experiences are stored in the brain, they will
interact with the previous events or experiences. This process is called “associating”. From the perspective of psychology, “associating” refers to the connection between
conceptual or mental entities as a result of the similarity between the mind or proximity in space and time. According to the theory of association, the learning
process will be managed effectively in if there is a direct interaction between teachers with learners. Interaction is done through stimulus and response SR .Thus, the basic
principles of the learning process in this theory is an association, which is also known as the theory of stimulus - response SR. Here, learners learning process occurs
slowly or gradually, not suddenly. e
Communicating According to Hasim 2013, presenting, dialoguing, inferring or concluding are
the learning activities for the communicating step. f.
Assessing Speaking
Assessing speaking is not an easy thing to do. It deals with so many things and it will give different results from one teacher to another. It is hard to know for certain
that a speaking score is exclusively a measure of oral production without the potentially frequent clarifications of an interlocutor. To cut down the difference in
giving the speaking score, each score should represent one of several traits pronunciation, fluency, vocabulary use, grammar, comprehensibility, etc., Brown
2004:140. There are five basic types of speaking cited by Brown 2004:141. They are
imitative, intensive, responsive, interactive, and extensive monologue. The first one is imitative. The ability to simply parrot back imitate a word or a phrase or possibly
a sentence is at one end of a continuum of types of speaking performance. While this is a purely phonetic level of oral production, a number of prosodic, lexical, and
grammatical properties of language may be included in the criterion performance. The second one is intensive. The production of short stretches of oral language
designed to demonstrate competence in a narrow band of grammatical, phrasal, lexical, or phonological relationships such as prosodic elements—intonation, stress,
rhythm, juncture is a second type of speaking frequently employed in assessment contexts. Responsive assessment tasks include interaction and test comprehension but
at the somewhat limited level of very short conversations, and the like. The next type is interactive. The difference between responsive and interactive
is in the length and complexity of the interaction, which sometimes includes multiple exchanges andor multiple participants. The last one is extensive oral production tasks
which include speeches, oral presentations, and storytelling. Interactive tasks are what some would describe as interpersonal, while the extensive includes more transactional
speech events.
Brown 2004:166 adds about holistic scoring taxonomies that imply a number of abilities that comprise “effective” communication and “competent” performance of
the task. There are three contributing factors to a final score on “overall comprehensibility”: pronunciation, grammar and fluency according to the original
version of the Test of Spoken English. Brown 2004:174 states that a popular pedagogical activity in communicative
language teaching classes is role playing. It frees students to be somewhat creative in their linguistic output within constraints set forth by the guidelines. Role play allows
some rehearsal time so that students can map out what they are going to say, in some versions. It also has the effect of lowering anxieties as students can, even for a few
moments, take on the persona of someone other than themselves. Role play opens some windows of opportunity for test-takers to use discourse
that might otherwise be difficult to elicit as an assessment device. Role play can be controlled or “guided” by the interviewer. This technique takes test-takers beyond
simple intensive and responsive levels to a level of creativity and complexity that approaches real-world pragmatics. Scoring presents the usual issues in any task that
elicits somewhat unpredictable responses from test-takers. The test administrator must determine the assessment objectives of the role play, then devise a scoring
technique that appropriately pinpoints those objectives.