Background to the Problem

CHAPTER I INTRODUCTION

A. Background to the Problem

The ability of using English as a means of communication is very much needed nowadays, but teaching speaking for most English teachers is not an easy job. Here are many problems faced by the students of Junior High School regarding how to improve their speaking skills. First, it relates to the condition of the students who are lack of vocabulary that will make them unable to say words during speaking class. Second, most of students are not confident to use English in speaking class, sometimes the students feel not confident to speak. Third, the student often speaks their Native language. To fix those problems, the writer uses the other method to improve the students‘ ability to improve their speaking skills that is communicative activities. In Indonesia, English is one of the compulsory subjects for Junior High School students as mentioned in the government rules No. 19 2005 articles 6 verse 1 about the scope of subjects in every level of education in the curriculum, the purpose of teaching and learning processes of English in Junior High School is to develop stude nts‘ communicative competence, both in oral and written forms. Speaking is one of the skills that have to be mastered by the students. In developing these skills, the students need to acquire communicative 1 competence which consists of discourse competence, linguistic competence, sociocultural competence, actional competence, and strategic competence Celce-Murcia et. al., 1995:10. Therefore, English teaching and learning processes should be concerned with all communicative competence of the students so that it is expected that the students can learn to use language to communicate fluently and accurately in various contexts. Students need to be active and really engaged or part of the learning process. On the other hand, teachers should no longer be the center of learning. Their tasks are providing students with opportunity that enables them to develop themselves. In this case, teachers are as facilitators. However, the situation in SMP N 8 Yogyakarta in Yogyakarta province, specifically in grade VIII, is somewhat different. The students are passive during the majority of the English lesson and look less motivated. They rarely practice their English ability in the classroom and outside. They were seen to have no interest in learning English inevitably resulting in their low English proficiency. Based on the appendices of the National Education Ministerial Regulations No. 232006 about the standard of graduate competence of English subject in Junior High Schools known as Standar Kompetensi Lulusan SKL, the students need to master the four macro language skills. One of these skills is speaking. The objective that needs to be achieved by the students in speaking is the ability to express meanings in spoken language in simple interpersonal and transactional texts formally as well as informally in the forms of recount, narrative, procedure, descriptive, and report in daily life. In line with this, stated in the basic competence, the students necessitate to produce the above texts fluently and accurately in terms of transactional to get things done or interpersonal to socialize relations, of course in spoken forms with the use of language functions such as asking, giving, and refusing services; asking, giving, and refusing things; accepting and denying facts; asking and giving opinions; inviting, accepting, and rejecting invitation; agreeing or disagreeing; complimenting, and congratulating. It is expected that the students can use the language functions in real communication in their daily life. The conditions of teaching learning processes did not seem to be satisfactory for the students and the English teacher of SMP N 8 Yogyakarta. The students said that they were not happy with the class activities since there was less opportunity for them to learn to use the language. They felt that the activities in the class were uninteresting and made them less motivated in joining the class. Related to this case, based on an informal discussion, the teacher agreed that those kinds of classroom situations were not in line with the curriculum. He said that if he kept applying those activities, the students would find it difficult to use English to communicate. This condition arouses my awareness to conduct the research in class VIII of SMP N 8 Yogyakarta. The research is an effort to improve the student s‘ ability in English conversation that conducted to improve students‘ English speaking skill through communicative activities. It w a s done through action research. To be able to do that, the problems should be identified in the next part.

B. Identification of the Problem