IMPROVING THE QUALITY OF COMMUNICATIVE STRUCTURE TEACHING AND LEARNING BY USING STRUCTURAL GAMES IN THE EIGHTH GRADE STUDENTS OF SMPN 12 JEMBER IN THE 2007/2008 ACADEMIC YEAR

Abstract

Grammar is one of the language components which is crucial in language learning. However, teaching grammar can be a daunting task. One of the problems arising is teaching English tenses. Different languages have different sentence structures. This often causes confusion and mistakes every time the learners attempt to produce English sentences. Consequently, they soon get bored and less motivated during the structure learning process. For that reason, it is necessary to make a grammar lesson effective, beneficial, and interesting through the use of some welldeveloped

and fascinating techniques that are based on communicative activities since the aim of learning a foreign language is for real language use rather than for producing well-formed sentences. Games are one of the techniques that fulfill the requirements. The structural games used in this study were ‘Fortune Teller’ game, ‘What did you do last night’ game and ‘What were you doing last Sunday afternoon’ game. The ‘Fortune teller’ game is a kind of game which requires learners to make some predictions about their friends’ fate dealing with career, money, etc. These predictions must be written in a form of simple future tense. The ‘What did you do last night?’ game requires learners to answer a friend’s questions in simple past tense according to the cards taken. The ‘What were you doing last Sunday afternoon?’ game is a kind of game in which learners are obliged to answer a friend’s question in past continuous tense according to the pictures taken. Classroom Action Research (CAR) with cycle model was applied in this study. The action research was carried out to improve the quality of communicative structure teaching and learning by using structural games in the eighth grade students of SMPN 12 Jember in the 2007/2008 academic year. It was conducted in two cycles in which each cycle covered three meetings. The subject of this research was class VIII D of SMPN 12 Jember consisting of 40 students. This class was determined as the research subject since this class had the lowest achievement of the target indicators among the four classes of the eighth grade in the preliminary study. The main data of this research were collected by using class observation. The instrument used was an observation paper in the form of checklist containing the indicators to be observed, namely: (1) the interaction between the teacher and the students, (2) the students’ participation in playing the structural games, (3) the students’ ability to use the tenses having been learnt communicatively in playing the games (4) interactive communication among the students or the players of the games and (5) the teacher’s role as the facilitator. The actions were considered successful if every indicator of communicative structure teaching and learning in this study could be fulfilled by at least 75% of the students and if the teacher’s role as the facilitator could be achieved. The results showed that the use of structural games could improve the quality of communicative structure teaching and learning in the eighth grade students of SMPN 12 Jember in the 2007/2008 academic year. The improvement was indicated by the percentage of the indicators of communicative structure teaching and learning in this study after being given the actions, namely: (1) 78.33% of the students interacted with the teacher, (2) 95.83% of the students actively participated in playing the games, (3) 89.17% of the students could use the tenses having been learnt communicatively in playing the games and (4) 89.17% of the students interactively communicated with other students. The teacher’s role as the facilitator could also be achieved. Considering the research result, it is suggested that the English teacher use the structural games as an alternative technique in teaching English tenses.