IMPROVING THE EIGHTH GRADE STUDENTS’ SPEAKING ACHIEVEMENT BY USING DRAMA TECHNIQUE AT SMPN 2 LEDOKOMBO IN THE 2014/2015 ACADEMIC YEAR

Abstract

This Classroom action research was intended to improve the eight grade students’ achievement and their active participation in speaking class by using drama technique at SMPN 2 Ledokombo in the 2014/2015 academic year. It was started by conducting informal interview with the English teacher of the eight grade students of SMPN 2 Ledokombo. There were 3 classes of eight grade at the school. Class VIIIB was chosen purposively as the subjects of this research because based on the result of preliminary study to the class VIIIB of SMPN 2 Ledokombo, the students experienced difficulties in speaking test. They usually felt unconfident to speak up. It made their speech less fluent. They also pronounced the TL words incorrectly and afraid of making mistakes in choosing the right vocabulary. The teacher explained that the students’ activeness in the learning process of speaking was low. It happened because most of them felt unconfident and afraid of expressing their own ideas in oral language. In addition, they were usually reluctant to participate in teaching learning process. It makes the students’ performance in speaking test not optimal. Considering the problems above, role play as a part of drama technique was chosen as a technique in teaching speaking to improve the students’ participation and achievement in speaking class. Classroom action research with cycle model was applied in this study. The action classroom research was carried out to improve the students’ achievement and participation in speaking class by using drama technique at the eight grade students of SMPN 2 Ledokombo in the 2014/2015 academic year. In the implementation, there was only one cycle which consist of three meeting. This classroomaction research was done with a sequence of steps namely: the planning of the action, the reflection of the action class observation and evaluation, and data analysis and reflection of the action. The classroom observation used an observation checklist to identify the students’ active participation while the speaking test used scoring criteria to measure the students’ speaking achieevement. The action were successful if 75% students participated actively in the speaking class and 75% students have achieved the target score that was 70. The result of action in meeting 1 unsuccessfully met the target indicators. There were only 17 students among 24 students (71%) who were active in this meeting. However, there was an improvement on the students participation in meeting 2. There were 20 of 24 students or 83% of the students participated actively in speaking class and 20 students or 83% achieved the target score. In addition, the general result of cycle 1 was 77% of the students were actively participated in the TL process of speaking using drama technique. This result had fulfilled the target indicators of the research. Hence, the action was stopped. This improvement happened because of some aspects that were revised in the lesson plan for meeting 2. The revised aspects were 1). Adding some warm up excercises in order to make the students motivated in the learning process. And 2). Adding the time for completing and making up the play for 20 minutes. Considering the reserach result, it was suggested that the English teacher use Drama Technique especially role play as an alternative technique in teaching speaking.