Improving the Eighth Grade Students’ Speaking Skill by Using Telegram as the Supporting Tool

Abstract

This classroom action research (CAR) aimed to enhance eighth-grade students’ speaking skills by using Telegram as a supporting tool for speaking tasks in junior high school. The participants were chosen purposely based on the preliminary study that revealed the students struggled with speaking skills and the issues concerning low engagement in the class. To address the problem, this research attempted to operationalize mobile technology and communicative language learning tasks. This research implemented two cycles, each involving two meetings of implementation and one meeting of speaking test. The data of this research was collected from the speaking test and also the observation. The result revealed the improvement of students’ speaking skills, in that the percentage of students achieving the threshold speaking proficiency rose from the first to the second cycle, 35% and 48%, respectively. The mobile-assisted speaking task was also found influential in amplifying students’ engagement, where 61% of them were observed to actively participate in the class. This class-based research contributes to nuanced understanding of how Telegram as a social media platform can be gainfully integrated into speaking tasks to provide more authentic experiences of speaking practice for even beginner English language learners.