Appropriate Task Improving Students Accuracy

67 Besides giving opportunity to the students to alter their activity for some time, complete the dialog also made association between the spoken language and the written language. In order to internalize the sound system into the writing system, the complete the dialog could facilitate the issue. Another finding was how to improve the students’ accuracy. The followings were the complete discussions.

2. Improving Students Accuracy

Another finding of this research was on improving the students’ accuracy. Based on the data gathered from the research and systematical analysis through trend analysis and data triangulation matrix, the writer discovered that in this research there were three important points on improving the students’ grammar and pronunciation accuracy. They were appropriate task and material, attractive teaching aids, and positive feedback.

a. Appropriate Task

Teaching elementary school students were different from teaching adults. One of the differences is related to the students’ intellectual development. Brown 2001: 88 explains that teacher should remember their limitation. Further, he explained that children’s intellectual development is on the stage of concrete operational development. Therefore, children are only centered on here and now and on the functional purposes of language. In addition, they cannot grasp metalanguage used by the teacher to explain linguistics concepts. PLAGIAT MERUPAKAN TINDAKAN TIDAK TERPUJI 68 It was in line with the real situation happened in the research during the employment of transformation drill and chain drill which was contrasted to the employment of the substitution drill and the question and answer. Transformation drill required the students to transform a type of sentence to be another type of sentence. The field notes and the single lesson time line record sheet noted that the employment of the transformation drill failed to improve the students’ grammar accuracy. Further, the interview disclosed that the failure of the transformation drill because the students found difficulties in transforming the sentences especially to select correct subject and verb. In addition, the students also found difficulties in arranging the words to make correct sentence. As the result, the intelligibility of the students’ pronunciation was also affected. Because the students concentrated much on the grammar, their replaced certain sound with another similar sound unintentionally. The writer noted that the students replaced the voiceless postalveolar fricative [ ʃ] with voiceless alveolar fricative [s], and they also replaced the near-close near front unrounded vowel [ ɪ] with close-mid front unrounded vowel [e]. The employment of the transformation drill was in contrast to the employment of the substitution drill. Instead of transforming a type of sentence to be another type of sentence, the substitution drill only required the students to substitute a part of a sentence. Additionally, the substitution drill also did not require the students to alter the arrangement of the words. They simply selected appropriate subject and verb. Therefore, during the employment of the substitution drill, the students’ grammar and pronunciation accuracy improved. 69 The interview sustained that the substitution drill was easier than the transformation drill. In other words, the substitution drill was at the level of the students’ intellectual development. The writer noted that during the employment of the substitution drill, the students not only could answer the teacher’s correctly but also quickly. On the other hand, the objective of the research was to improve the students’ pronunciation accuracy especially on the near-close near front unrounded vowel [ ɪ], voiceless postalveolar fricative [ʃ] and voiced dental fricative [ ð ] were achieved. Similar to the employment of the transformation drill, the chain drill also could not improve the students’ accuracy. In the chain drill, whenever the chain came to the six observed students, the chain was stuck. Although sometimes the students attempted to answer, they made mistake of both grammar and pronunciation. At this point, the teacher usually stopped and explained how to answer the questions. However, the teacher’s explanation could not help the students to improve their accuracy cf. Brown 2001: 88. Therefore, the writer replaced the employment of the chain drill with question and answer. On contrary, the employment of the question and answer could improve the students’ accuracy on both grammar and pronunciation. Question and answer only required the students to concentrate on a certain type of sentence, either question or answer. Therefore, the question and answer provided ample opportunity for students to practice on both type of sentence. The writer noted that during the employment of the question and answer the students could answer quickly and accurately whenever the teacher gave questions. Similarly, students’ 70 pronunciation also improved. Based on the writer’s noted, the students could pronounce accurately words contained near-close near front unrounded vowel [ ɪ], voiceless postalveolar fricative [ ʃ], and voiced dental fricative [ ð ]. The interview was conducted by the writer also discovered that the students thought the question and answer was easier than chain drill in that they could concentrate on one type of sentence. Other aspects contributed to the improvement of the students’ accuracy were attractive teaching aids and positive feedback. The following was the discussion of the native like setting.

b. Attractive Teaching Aids