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something in second or foreign language. Yet, they still hesitated to speak and seemed meaningless due to the unknown background knowledge.
Thus, I prepared for conducting the second cycle by making lesson plan and some instruments to be applied in the next session to build up the students’
grammatical rules and speaking skill.
3.9 Second Cycle
After establishing the first cycle, I held second cycle. There were also two meetings in this cycle. The first meeting was held on January 10, 2011.
Meanwhile, the second meeting was handled on January 12 , 2011. The first meeting focused on the improvement of students’ ability in past
tense and the form of the sentence, e.g. from positive to negative form. Then, they were supposed to develop the sentences in a good structure and also in an
appropriate verb. It was strongly supported by Lundquist 2009:18 cited that most English
classes teach grammar as a foundation of spoken English. It can be right that the paradigm of learning foreign language well is from the basic rules of grammar.
The aim is to get the understanding while applying spoken language. Thus, the grammatical rules were still the main concern in this study.
4.2.1 Planning
From the result of the first cycle which was not satisfying enough in the case of grammatical competence in past tense, the researcher planned to have the second
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cycle. The main focus in this cycle was the improvement of cycle 1 lackness which would be developed more deeply. The technique which had to be more
elaborated was the transformation drill because the students got difficult in changing the form of sentences. In addition, the frequence of students made
grammatical mistakes in past tense was still high. The situation of the class in the cycle 1 at time was a bit noisy because the
students were still exhausted after doing the weekly test. That’s why, in the cycle 2, the class management was needed to enhance.
Then, I elaborated the lesson plan of transformation drill with some exercises also in order to get used to applying that technique to be received
smoothly. Besides, the researcher laso planned to make and elaborate the test items in a questionnaire.
This plan had the same correlation with Harmer 2007: 123 gave some points that there were three main reasons for getting students to speak in the
classroom. Firstly, speaking activities provided rehearsal opportunities or chances to practise real life speaking in the safety of the claasroom. Secondly, speaking
tasks in which students tried to use any or all of the languages they knew and provided feedback for both teacher and students. Eveyone could see how well
they were doing: this could be both how successful they were and also what certain language problems they were experiencing so far. Finally, the students had
more activities to activate the various elements of language they had stored in their brains.
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Thus, that concept would be applied in the teaching learning activities to motivate students and give them more activities or rehearsal to speak in the
classroom.
4.2.2 Acting
As it was shown the above explanation of first cycle lackness, I emphasized for the elaboration of the materials, the class management, the exercises, and
students’ motivation in learning simple past tense. I did the second cycle session in two meetings. In the first meeting, I greeted
the students by giving the dialog about what they did on last weekend or holiday. The students had to pay attention to the use of past tense. In this case, the
problems were as many as possible decreased. Then, they also had to look to their pronunciation, vocabulary and fluency in delivering certain dialog in telling the
past event. The class began with high spirit and motivation. I directly started the lesson
by drilling the students of simple past tense by using transformation drill. Because they tended to make mistakes in changing the verbs in the form of sentences like
positive into negative in the beginning of class, by keeping the main verb in the past verb, e.g. + I went to Surabaya, when they changed the verb into negative
form, they changed it like this - I did not went to Surabaya. Then, in the middle of the lesson, I kept on drilling them by transformation
drill even they also still did the same mistakes. Fortunately, by repeating many times, they eventually got the point and understood the materials.
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Next, I moved to another students to have the drilling. I showed the pictures of the job, ‘teacher’ and ‘typist’. Before that, I asked students what pictures they
were. Then, they responded in many perspectives. Some said that the picture of teacher replaced by the picture of doctor, engineer, professor. Meanwhile, the
others said that the picture of typist replaced by the picture of secretary, computer programmer, and student.
The students were enthusiastic and active in teaching learning activity after I showed the picture. Furthermore, I decided to choose the picture of teacher and
typist as the media to teach the students. Then, I drilled the other students again with the same form of sentences. Luckily, they step by step knew and understood
the materials about simple past tense. Moreover, the time of teaching learning activity remained for about thirty
minutes to do the exercises. I split the students in the same groups like they had in the pre-test session. Each group consisted of two persons associated together to do
the exercises. The exercises told about changing the positive, negative or interrogative sentence in a correct form.
Then, in pairs, they were supposed to complete the missing verbs in the dialog and tried to speak it out after they were finished. They had to fill in the
blanks with the expressions and appropriate verbs they had already learned before. At last, they were recommended to compose their own dialog based on the
situation given and then tried to practice. Finally, the first meeting of the second cycle was over. The last exercise was
the homework they had to practise in the next meeting. I asked the students
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whether any questions or not. In the end of the meeting, I reviewed for a moment about the materials and then closed the teaching learning activity.
In the next session, the second treatment was conducted. I greeted the students by asking any homework or not and what they did on last weekend or
holiday. The students responded in different answers. Most of them were having vacation with family and friends. The rest said that they were just at home
watching television and helped their parents there. From those opinions, I started the lesson by giving the model of dialog
entitled ‘visiting the tourism resort’. The students paid attention to the teacher seriously. He re-explained about the tenses which were used. After that, they
practised the dialog they had just made in the previous meeting as homework. The teaching learning process was still about the form of sentence. In this
session, the change of positive into interrogative and conversely. e.g. + I traveled to Europe
, ? Did you traveled to Europe? The unnderlined verb was one of the mistake in changing the verb in the structure of sentence.
Then, I drilled the students by transformation drill. The procedure was the same with the first meeting. It was just the additional material to be practiced.
And, it emphasized the previous materials. The difference in this session was that, they did some exercises more in order to understand the materials given very well.
The exercises were changing the verb from simple to the past regular and irregular verbs. Moreover, they’re instructed to elaborate the dialog they had just
made in the previous meeting in order to enrich vocabulary.
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During the teaching learning process, I also observed the students’ activity whether they paid attention to the materials or not. In addition, whether or not
they were active in the classroom as the teacher explained the materials. Then, whether or not they did exercises and made a noise. It would be showed in the
journal of the teaching leaarning process in the appendix.
4.2.3 Observing
