The Teacher’s Use of Role Play to Teach Speaking in Low Speaking Class

Abstract

Teaching English for EFL learners is not easy, especially regarding to speaking skills. This research aimed to describe the teacher’s problem in teaching speaking by using role play in low speaking class as well as to know the students’ speaking achievement. The preliminary study was done by interviewing the English teacher of the eight grade students of an urban junior high school in a small town in Jember regency, East Java, Indonesia on Saturday, 25th February 2023. She taught six classes of the eighth grade, and class VIII F was the class which had the most problems in speaking. The participant of this study was the English teacher. There are several problems that must be faced by the teacher. The problem that often occurs is due to the lack of vocabulary. On the other hand, the mother tongue also influences when the students practice speaking English. Finally, teachers must listen more carefully to what students say. Therefore, the teacher must provide the right example in the pronunciation of each word in English. Due to the lack of vocabulary, many students are not fluent in English. The average student in the class hesitated to speak English and stop because of the language limitations. Students only used English when they were involved in learning process or when the teacher required them to speak English. Apart from that, students no longer used English. Another issue that the teacher needs to focus on is grammar. Many students are still unsure about which tenses to use while creating the dialog. To overcome these problems, the teacher used role play to make the students actively involved in the learning process. However, the teacher is facing several problems related to the time management, the preparation of role play that required long process, and the ix students’ performances which was not really good as they did not practice their dialogs seriously. Meanwhile, there was an increase in students' speaking achievement from odd to even semesters. It could be seen from the four aspects of speaking which were pronunciation, grammar, vocabulary, and fluency. Student speaking scores increased by an average of one point in each aspect.