IMPROVING STUDENTS’ PRONOUNCING ABILITY USING PHONICS
IMPROVING STUDENTS’ PRONOUNCING ABILITY USING PHONICS ( Kindergarten B Students’ of TK Kalam Kudus Pontianak in Academic Year 2014/2015) ARTICLE
Jurisdiction Responsibility By:
Vivi Kurniati F42108062
Approved by: Supervisor I Supervisor II Drs. Bambang Wijaya Drs. Luwandi Suhartono, M.Hum
NIP. 195011241979031005 NIP. 196211011990021001
Dean of Teacher Training Education Faculty Head of Language and Art Department
Dr. H. Martono, M.Pd Drs. Nanang Heryana, M.Pd NIP. 196803161994031014 NIP. 196107051988101001
IMPROVING STUDENTS’ PRONOUNCING ABILITY USING PHONICS
Vivi Kurniati, Bambang Wijaya, Luwandi Suhartono
English Education Study Program, Teacher Training and Education Faculty Tanjungpura University,
Pontianak
Abstract
This research was conducted to solv e the problems that were the students’ lack of reading in their
first reading, and to find out whether the phonics technique can increase the student’s reading
ability. The purposes of this research were: “To obtain how well phonics to improve students’
pronouncing ability” to the students of TK Kalam Kudus Pontianak. In this research, phonics is
applied as one technique in order to increase young learner’s reading skill. Phonics is one strategy
to help young children in pronouncing words or sentences to me asure students’ pronouncingability. It is used to help students represent sound or sounds. For the young learners, it works as a
guideline when they start reading, because they can ready a word or sentences but pronounce its
sound. The method of this research was Classroom Action Research. The research was conducted
in three cycles. Each of cycle consists of four stages that is planning, action, observing, and
reflecting stage. The subject of this research was 15 students who are the students of Kindergarten
B TK Kalam Kudus Pontianak. The finding proves that phonics technique is effective to improve
the students’ reading ability. The result of this research is the Kindergarten B students of TK
Kalam Kudus Pontianak has shown their significant progress in improving reading by using
phonics in each cycle: first cycle 1.4 point (very poor), second cycle 2.3 point (average) and third
cycle 3.1 point (good). This means that phonics in one technique which is useful to improve
students’ reading skill.Keywords: Phonics, Young Learners, Pronouncing, Classroom Action Reseach
INTRODUCTION Reading is one of the four important representations of speech) andcomprehension.
skills that are used in learning English. Readers may use Reading is a complex cognitive process of for the intention of meaning of unknown words. Readers constructing or deriving meaning . It is a means of language existing framework of knowledge or schema acquisition of communication, and of sharing . information and ideas. In addition, it is a Teaching reading is one of the other complex interaction between the text and the subje cts that kindergarten’s teacher should do.
To teach reading to children in this phase of reader which is shaped by the reader’s prior
knowledge, experiences, attitude, and age is not easy. However, as an expert language community which is culturally and famous quote “We learn to read by reading” socially situated. The reading process (Smith, cited in Bald, 2007:40). That is why; requires continuous practices, development, the way to teach reading is influential. We and refinement. Readers use a variety of should have many interesting things to keep reading strategies to assist with decoding (to their focus on the lesson. There are many one of them. Phonics is the systematic teaching of the sound conveyed by letters and groups of letters, and includes teaching children to combine and blend these to read or write words. Phonics plays a key part in the process by making the representation of the sounds of words explicit, so that it can be controlled and applied deliberately to the task of reading and constructing words (Bald, 2007:39). We cannot read fluently until we read accurately, and this depends on accurate use of the information conveyed by letters. In reading, learners reconstruct the word by blending the sounds represented by the letters. Although letters often give us more than sounds, their links with sounds are their most consistent and important feature, and there is some link with sound in every word. Children and adults who can use this connection fluently and accurately build up a store of words that they can read very quickly. In addition, teaching phonics means that we also investigate students’ ability of pronouncing. Pronunciation involves far more than individual sounds. Pronunciation is a way of speaking a word, especially a way that is accepted or generally understood. It is also a graphic representation of the way a word is spoken, using phonetic symbols. In this term, researcher takes some points of scoring students’ pronunciation, such as voicing, vowel length and specific sound. When we read, we retrieve and put together information that has been set down using the alphabetic system, and when we write, we use it to represent, in order, the sounds that we would otherwise say. This is syntactic phonics or word building. Syntactic phonics enables readers to extract and use the information represented by letter, and with practice, to build up a store of words that are read so quickly that they seem to take almost no time to work out. Synthetic phonics in spelling is easily integrated with reading. Children can build words using plastic or magnetic letters as they learn to read them. This avoids them having to write each word by hand in the early stages, allowing all their attention to be focused on the sounds and letters so that they have maximum opportunity to understand and reinforce the connections. The researcher chooses this school as the object of research because Kalam Kudus School has a program in order to teach reading fluently for children.To read a word, children need to memorize how to read each word. For example to read “cat” children have to know, the word which contains of “c-
a- t” are read by ”cat”. This is not effective because we can imagine how difficult to memorize all words that they have to learn.
That is why, reading activity becomes difficult for kindergarten level. Phonics help children with a system to read. It helps children to have a key in pronouncing each alphabet. For comparing, learning phonics than memorizing each words, of course phonics more help students for reading. They just need to know the 44 phonemes in phonics, and blend it into the word. That is the basic to teach student in order to read the phrases or sentences. Reading is one of ways to touch the world, and students will be proud by themselves in order to read independence and have experience by reading book, even a simple story book they have. As Freire and Marcado (cited in Goouch and Lambirth, 2007:79) said, reading the word so that you can later read it are preceded by learning how to write the world, that is, having the experience of changing the world and touching the word. One of the ways to teach children how to read a text, we should teach them how to pronounce each word rightly. It will help student get reading fluently as well as pronounce the word rightly. That is why the researcher is concerned with this case as the basic of reading pronunciation. Therefore, a good and interesting technique to teach reading is a necessity. There are many ways to teaching reading, using phonics is one of those. Phonics helps the learners to pronounce and read the words or sentences easily. For example, adult knows the word of “c-a-t” is read as “cat”. However, young learner does not know, they might read it as Indonesian or English that has different pronouncing of the alphabet. Phonics help the learner to recognize “c /khe/
- – a /ae/ – t /the/” so they can combine them to become “cat” (note: students’ have been taught how to pronounce each phonics before). Phonic work for young learner should be multi-sensory in order to capture their interest, sustain motivation, and reinforce learning in imaginative and exiting ways. The researcher believes that for those reasons, this method is giving a good impact fo r young learner’s first reading. In reference to the research background and considering the topic, researcher puts forward this following problem of this research: “Improving Students’ Pronouncing Ability Using Phonics” How does reading through phonics help students pronounce a sentence well? The purpose of this research is: This research aims at investigating whether using phonics as a method in the classroom can help kindergarten students of Kalam Kudus Christian School Pontianak in the academic year 2014/2015 to pronounce a sentence rightly. Based on the problem that the teacher in this case the writer of this research has explained in the research background, the significance of this action research will be the use of “Phonics” as a method of teaching will improve the students’ ability in pronouncing sentence to the kindergarten students of Kalam Kudus Christian School Pontianak. In order to avoid misunderstanding of terms which exist in this research, it is necessary to explain them as follows
a) Reading in this research refers to the ability to pronounce rightly what the students read in the simple sentence (arrange for kindergarten students level, for example: The tent is up).
b) Phonics is a method to teach reading, in this term the writer just uses simple phonics to teach young children, it contains the sound from letter a
—z and, for addition, some blend sound, example: br, tr, fr.
c) Classroom Action Research is classroom- based research which is applied to find the best solution to the problem faced by teacher in the classroom, in order to improve teaching learning process.
d) TK Kalam Kudus is a bilingual school that is located at Jalan Purnama no. 52, here the students are taught by i-learning approach (phonics is one of the method in teaching reading skill). Teaching English for young learner becomes a necessity in this recent day. As fast as the period changes, the world of education is the same. Some of bilingual schools have put English as the primary language. Some of elementary schools have put English as the basic language to teach some subject, such as math, science and others. That is why learning English for nursery and kindergarten students becomes world-wide phenomenon. Teaching English for young learners has its rules. One of them is the language or vocabularies must be appropriate with their age and enjoyable for them. Young learner learns very quickly and they have so much fun with learning (Donaldson, 1987 cited in Scott, et.al). Children move through a number of stages when learning English as a new language. Some go through these stages more quickly than others, and children will sometimes have the characteristics of more than one stage at the same time as their transition between stages. Understanding a child’s stage of learning is important for planning appropriate activities. Some children initially use their home language in educational settings because it is the only language they know. Most young children give up using their home language quickly, realizing that it is not an effective means of communication in that context. If a few children in a setting share the same home language, they may continue to use it amongst themselves. In a new setting, young children may not use any language at all, or very little, for a few weeks or even months. They are listening and accumulating knowledge of English, but are sometimes hesitant to speak much. Children often use gestures to communicate with adults and other children. Sometimes they may rehearse phrases in English quietly to themselves. Children gradually move from memorized sentences to original, productive and spontaneous English conversation. When young children learning English can engage in conversational English, this does not mean that they have mastered the English language. In fact, their English often has errors in pronunciation, vocabulary and grammar, and these errors may last a long time. In conclusion, we need to have a lot of interaction with the young learner in English to maintenance their English. In the first place, good teachers at this level need to provide a rich diet of learning experiences which encourage their students to get information from a variety of sources, and have to change the activity when they see their students getting bored. Teachers of young children need to spend time understanding how their students think and operate. They need to be able to pick up current interests so that they can use them to motivate them. There is a need for highly skilled and dedicated teaching of teachers who teach young learners.Teaching has a purpose to make students know about the lesson, since the students do not know anything at all about the lesson until they understand even master the lesson. According to Brown (1980:7), teaching is any activity of the person to show or to help others how to do something in order to know or to understand the instruction given and to guide the knowledge. Gade cited in Brown (1980:8) defines teaching as any activity which is decided to facilitate learning, include the setting of condition for learning and to make the learner able to learn. Brown (1980: 9) in his book stated that teaching is a process in which learner, teacher, curriculum and other variables are organized in a systematic way to attain some determined goals. It can be simulation, direction, guidance and encouragement of learning. Correspondingly, he claimed that teaching is showing or helping someone to learn how to do something, giving instruction, guiding in the study of something, providing with knowledge, causing to know or understand. Teaching and learning process are acquiring or getting of knowledge of a subject or a skill by study experience or instructions. Teaching is the activities that teachers decide, create, show in a certain way to enable students understand the instruction so that they are able to learn. The teacher’s role is to help the students, show them how to master the lesson and give tricks in order to make the students easy to receive the lesson. The teaching process should be useful and effective to teach student about type of knowledge. Effective teaching means teacher is able to select and implement a teaching strategy that is appropriate to the curriculum goal and the information processing capabilities of student’s level. It means curriculum cannot be separated from a material in the process of teaching and learning. A student's first language often interferes with English pronunciation. For example, /p/ is aspirated in English but not in Indonesian language, so when a Indonesian speaker pronounces 'pig' without a puff of air on the /p/, a foreign speaker may hear 'big' instead. Sometimes the students will be able to identify specific problem sounds and sometimes they won't. You can ask them for suggestions, but you will also need to observe them over time and make note of problem sounds. Another challenge resulting from differences in the first language is the inability to hear certain English sounds that the native language does not contain. Often these are vowels, as in 'ship' and 'sheep,' which many learners cannot distinguish. Descriptions of the sound and mouth position can help students increase their awareness of subtle sound differences.
METHODOLOGY
In solving the problem, it is important to decide the method of the research. The method of the research intends to investigate the phonics as the approach of teaching reading for kindergarten students. For that reason, the appropriate form of the research Action Research. According to Kemmis and McTaggaert, 1988:5 cited in Louis Cohen, Lawrence Manion and Keithh Mo rrison (2000:227) action research is: “A form of collective self-reflective inquiry undertaken by participants in social situations in order to improve the rationally and justice of their own social and educational practices, as well as their understanding of these practices are carried out.” The other expert, Stephen Corey said that Classroom Action Research is the process by which practitioners attempt to study their problems scientifically in order to guide, correct, and evaluate their decisions and actions. Stenhouse, cited in Cohen, Manion and Marison (2006:227) states that the main focus of action research in classroom and school is to encourage teachers to become involved in their own practices, and view themselves as researchers. Kemmis and McTaggart (1992:10) cited in Louis Cohen,et.al,(2000:227) argue that “to do action research is to plan, act, observe and reflect more carefully, more systematically, and more rigorously than one usually does in everyday life”. Classroom Action Research has four stages that should be done as the procedures, as Lewin (1946:1984) cited in Cohen,et.al,(2006-234) codified the Classroom Action Research process into four stages: planning , acting, observing and reflecting. The process of an action research based on Zuber-Sterrit (1996) cited in Cohen,et.al, (2006:232) is as follows:
Schema of Classroom Action Research
The cycle form: Planning
Reflecting Acting Observing
Planning : For doing the research Action : Application/the action of plan in the real treatment Observing : To see how the process of listening comprehension using video.
Reflecting : Study what we will have done and reflect it for the students’ learning. The Classroom Action Research is usually conducted in certain cycles and the procedure of this research can be seen from the activities of each cycle as the following.
1) Planning
The writer plans the teaching learning activity to over come the problem found in the previous teaching learning process, which is the lack of student’s skill in pronouncing the phonics. The plans include the preparation before the teaching learning activity such as lesson plan, plastic letters and some objects to be learned, booklet, and supporting media such as Laptop, LCD, and slide of phonic letters or words.
2) Acting
To act the planning, the writer as a teacher teaches the lesson that has already been prepared and will conduct the research in the classroom where the problem was found. The teacher drilled the students using media to show them some letters and sound it out by phonics, after that the word which consists of 3-6 letters to teach them spell it in phonics, then, pronounce it well. To make some variation, teacher can use plastic letter with interesting object to teach. Then if they can read word fluently, the teacher is able to add some more words to become phrases or simple sentence (example: ‘the fat rat’, ‘a big pan’, ‘a crack on the egg’, etc).
3) Observing
In the observation step, the teacher was observing students’ pronouncing. The assessment of the students’ performance is using personal reading guided by the teacher. In this matter, teacher will identify some error found in students’ pronunciation and will tell them more specifically. The teacher made some notes and kept it to know and predict how far the students master the phonics.
performance, the writer will get some important feedback. The feedback is very important in re-planning the next action. It changes a certain action or add some more actions in order to improve the teaching learning process. The participant that is observed by researcher is kindergarten students of Kalam Kudus Christian School Pontianak. The researcher will take a class in Kindergarten of Kalam Kudus School in academic year 2013/2014 to be the participants of this research. The number of students is 15 students in a class that researcher takes. The technique that is used to collect data is observation and measurement technique.
Observation checklist is used to observe the students and teacher act in practicing the reciprocal of teaching technique in the form of checklist table. Field note is a note, which is made to record the important events that happen throughout the teaching learning process when the treatment is applied to support the data from observation sheet. The measurement consists of scoring rubric in each lesson plan. The instrument that is used to collect data is a test that consists of phonics booklet. After the students are given the treatment, the researcher gives the booklet as the instrument for measure students’ pronouncing ability and reading simple sentence booklet.
RESULT AND DISCUSSION Result
To know whether phonics can improve the students’ reading pronunciation, the writer will conduct an observation from the three meetings and the result of three meetings will be compared. When the average frequency of students’ pronunciation of the second meeting is higher that the first meeting and the third meeting is higher that the second meeting, it can be concluded that teaching pronouncing using phonics is able to improve students’ ability in pronouncing. There are several techniques used by the researcher to analyze the data. In this research the researcher uses the following data analysis.
Based on the note taken and the data has been collected by measuring students’
Table of Qualification
Test Score Qualification Good to Excellent Average to Good Poor to Average Poor
The observation consists of observation checklist and researcher’s field note
Analysis on the students’ mean score …………………………………(1)
Note: M = The mean or average score of students actions = The sum of score of students’ actions = The number of the students being observed (Adapted from Chitraelu,1993:315 in Lim, Elissa 2008:40) In order to know whether phonics method can improve the students’ pronouncing ability, their pronunciations are measured by using the analytical rating scale.
The qualifications of the students’ rating scores are presented below: N = Total students T = Total student Percentage of Total Percentage Score = x 100 …………………… (2)
Discussion
In the first treatment, the students were exited to learn the phonics technique. When the teacher showed them a video about phonics songs, they requested to re-play it several times. They learned to sing the song and the teacher drilled phonics flashcard. In the first meeting, the teacher help them to combine each letter become a word. It is quite difficult for the first, but it becomes easier when they have mastered to sound out each phonic. The students firstly pronounce words, which contains of three words. For instance, b – a – g , bag. After the students could pronounce the three letters words, the teacher continues to teach them more complicate words. Here is mean that a word with blend sound (br, cr, dr, gr, oo, ee), diagraph sounds (sh, ch, th, wh), etc. The teacher also gave some phrases to advise their ability in pronouncing through phonics. Instance, a red rod, ten nuts, etc. The students almost mastered to pronounce the phrases well. However to link each word still become a problem. That is why, the teacher ask them to read it more than once until they understand what linking word is.
pronunciation performance. It indicated a significant sign of the students pronouncing ability increased. The students interest to pronounce those phrases. Firstly, they can apply the phonics into words and phrases, the second each sentence followed by the picture. During the activity of pronouncing, when they found difficulties in pronouncing, they liked to ask the teacher actively. Then the teacher gave encourage and asked them to remember by mention each phonic (for example: jump; j
CONCLUSION AND SUGGESTION Conclusion
According to the result of this Classroom Action Research design, the progress of the students’ pronouncing development can be seen from the mean score improvement in each meeting. After applying phonics technique for three meetings, it is found that phonics is able in increasing the students’ pronouncing ability. For the first meeting, the students’ mean scores is 1.4 point (qualified as very poor), the second cycle is 2.3 point (qualified as average) and the last cycle is increased to 3.1 point (qualified as good).
It is one of many methods to teach young learner in their very first reading through an interesting way. Students are required to pronounce, in the other hand they can be understand the phrases or sentences as well as recognize new vocabularies.
Furthermore, in the last meeting, the students showed a significant progress of the students’
Suggestion
Research finding in this pronouncing may suggest something to improve the teaching learning activity especially in teaching pronouncing ability. The teachers could apply phonics technique in improving students’ pronouncing ability since this technique is useful to improve the students’ pronouncing ability.
- – u
- – m- p – jump). If the students really stuck and can not continue their pronouncing, teacher helps them to pronounce it then ask them to pronounce it again. This technique also increased the students’ cognitive to their reading comprehension through the picture of the sentences. In addition from those sentences, they can learn other new vocabularies. The students became active to asked if there is some unidentified meaning from the picture. Furthermore, from the result of the analysis, the students’ problem in pronouncing especially in blending sound can be increased. The improvement indicated the action hypothesis is already accepted. In conclusion, the research finding of the classroom action research is satisfying.
Mulla, K. A. (2010). Developing Young sound out the phonics, how to sound out the
Learners’ Reading Skill in an EFL
blend sound phonics, voice and voiceless Classroom . EFL Reading Skill, 89-98. sound, fluency or linking the word and how to distinguish similar sounds (specific
Norton, L. S. (2009). Action Research in sounds). While the students are in progress of
Teaching & Learning . Oxon: Routledge.
the technique, the teacher should be the partner or facilitator in learning process in Purewal, S. (2008). Synthetic Phonics and order to guide and motivate the students to
The Literacy Development of Second improve their pronunciation. Language Young Learner . ESL Journal,
36-44
REFERENCES Scott, W. A., & Ytreberg, L. H. (2006).
Bald, J. (2007). Using Phonics to Teach
Teaching English to Children . London: Reading and Spelling . London: Paul Longman.
Chapman Publishing. Brown, D. H. (2001). Teaching by Principle:
An Interactive Approach to Language Pedagogy . New York: Pearson Education
Limited. Cohen, L., Manion, L. & Morrison, K.
(2000). Research Method in Education. Taylor & Francis e-Library
Edge, N. (2001). ABC Phonics: Sing, Sign,
and Read! Teacher’s Guide. 6-37
Johnston, R., & Watson, J. (2007). Teaching
Synthetic Phonics . Glasgow: Learning Matters Ltd.