Enhancing the Eight-Grade Students’ Speaking Achievement by Project-Based Digital Video Recording

Abstract

Speaking is an important skill of language learning. Harmer (2007:269) states that speaking is the ability to speak fluently and presupposes not only knowledge of language features, but also the ability to process information and language ‘on the spot’. Unfortunately, speaking becomes difficult skill to be mastered by language learners especially EFL learners since it requires many challenges should be fulfilled. Therefore, this classroom action research was conducted to enhance the eighth grade students’ speaking achievement. The preliminary study was done by interviewing the English teacher of SMPN 10 Jember on November, 2019. Based on the result of interview, the eighth grade A was the class with the lowest speaking achievement. There were only 11 from 32 students who passed the minimum score of speaking. The English teacher stated that most students were slow learners they easily forgot materials they learned in the classroom and felt hard to remember it. Besides, they commonly mispronounced English vocabularies even on the basic vocabularies such as name of days. To overcome the problems, a suitable learning technique was needed to be applied. That was the use of smartphone which could easily engage learners in helping them learning speaking by project-based digital video recording. Digital video is recorded as digital data that can be stored, manipulated and edited on a computer. The advanced technology nowadays, the use of digital video recording can be simplified by using mobile phone feature to record every progress that the students’ made easily. There were three methods applied to collect the data; (1) speaking test, (2) interview and (3) documentation. This research used cycle model with four stages xii of activities covering: (1) the planning of the action, (2) the implementation of the action, (3) observation and evaluation, (4) reflection of the action (Kemmis and Taggart, 1988). This research was conducted in one cycle with 2 meetings carried out on the 25th of July to and 5th of August 2020. The speaking achievement test was administered in the third meeting after the actions had been done. Based on the results of the speaking test, there were 23 students or 71.83 % of 32 students achieved the passing grade score that was 73 and 9 students achieved scores below 73. Meanwhile the success criteria of this research was at least 70% of the students could achieve the minimum of the English score that was 73. It could be concluded that the students’ result of speaking test achieved the success criteria of the research by the use of project-based digital video recording. It showed that the eighth- grade students could enhance their speaking achievement at SMPN 10 Jember in the 2020/2021 academic year.