The Effect of Using Group Work Discussion Strategy on Students’ Speaking Achievement of the Eighth Grade Students

Abstract

Speaking has a great role in teaching learning process because by having oral communication, students are able to express their ideas orally and understand what others say to create communication directly. Yet the fact shows that the students still often have difficulty in their speaking ability. Therefore, the English teachers have to determine the effective strategy to make the students get better learning for their speaking achievement. Cooperative learning is expected to attract students’ participation with their speaking performance and also to create a joyful teaching and learning process. In this research, the researcher decided to use group work discussion as the strategy in teaching speaking. Quasi Experimental research with post-test only design was used in this research to know whether there was a significant effect of using group work discussion on the eighth grade students’ speaking achievement at SMPN 7 Jember or not. The researcher chose SMPN 7 Jember as the research area because group work discussion was never used as strategy by the English teacher in teaching speaking for the eighth grade students in the 2018/2019 academic year. The number of the respondents was 70 in total. The experimental group consisted of 35 students and so did the control group. The respondents of this research were selected by cluster random sampling. The experimental group got treatment by using group work discussion, while the control group used lecturing technique. There were two kinds of data used in this research; the students’ speaking scores, and the result of interview and documentation. Before the research was conducted, homogeneity analysis from students’ previous speaking score was conducted to know whether the population was homogeneous or not. The result showed that the population was homogeneous, as the value of the variance (0.088) was higher than 0.05. Therefore, the researcher used cluster random sampling by using lottery to determine the experimental and the control groups. The result of the test was analysed by using independent sample T-test on SPSS to find the significant difference of the experimental group and the control group. The result showed that the value of the significant 2 tailed was 0.002, which means that it was lower than the significance degree (0.05). Therefore, the null hyphothesis saying that “there is no significant effect of using group work discussion on students’ speaking achievement” was rejected. Consequently, the alternate hyphothesis saying that “there is a significant effect of using group work discussion on students’ speaking achievement” was accepted. Regarding with the result of hypothesis verivication, it can be concluded that there was a significant effect of using group work discussion on students’ speaking achievement. Consequently, it is suggested that the English teacher of SMPN 7 Jember use group work discussion as the strategy in teaching speaking as consideration and information to create relaxing atmosphere in the teaching and learning process. For the students, it is expected that the use of group work discussion can help them practice English, especially when they want to improve their speaking achievement. For future researchers, hopefully it can be used as a consideration to conduct a further research dealing with a similiar topic by using different research area and different research design such as a classroom action research to improve the students’ speaking achievement by using group work discussion in other schools. However, the researcher realized that there was still a deficiency in conducting this research. The researcher felt that the time allocation used for this research was insufficient. Therefore, it is expected for future researchers to have more time for their researches so that the results will be more significant and qualified.