THE EFFECT OF ACTIVATING THE EIGHTH GRADE STUDENTS’ SCHEMATA WITH PICTURES IN PRE-LISTENING STAGE ON THEIR LISTENING COMPREHENSION ACHIEVEMENT AT SMPN 2 BALUNG IN THE 2011/2012 ACADEMIC YEAR

Abstract

In learning English, especially English as Foreign Language, learners still face many problems and difficulties in mastering the four language skills. Most students who learn EFL (English as a Foreign Language) consider that listening is relatively difficult. This condition also happens to Indonesian learners, especially at Junior High Schools. The problem of listening also occurrs at the grade eight students who study at SMPN 2 Balung. The students often experience difficulties in grabing the ideas from the spoken language, especially with unfamiliar topics. To help the students develop their listening comprehension, the researcher proposed to activate students‟ schemata with pictures in the pre-listening stage as one of the teaching techniques in teaching listening comprehension. By activating the studens‟ schemata, the teacher can help the students to predict the materials that they will be heard. Besides that, the use of pictures to activate the students‟ schemata is very useful. They help the students to match the visual information with the audio. Therefore, using pictures to activate students‟ schemata helped the students to predict the text that they listened and then comprehended it. Sheerin (1987:127) states that the language teachers have to help and encourage the students to set up useful predictions and activate relevant concepts and experiences in their mind before they listen in the classroom because the listening materials and the listener‟s task are difficult and complex. This research was conducted to investigate the effect of activating the eighth grade students‟ schemata with pictures in pre-listening stage on their listening comprehension achievement at SMPN 2 Balung in the 2011/2012 academic year. The population of this research was all of the grade eight students of SMPN 2 Balung in the 2011/2012 academic year. The research respondents were determined by homogeneity analysis. The homogeneity analysis was conducted by taking the grade eight students final exam score in the first semester. The total number of the respondents was 70 students, consisting of 32 students of grade VIII-A as the experimental group. The experimental group received treatment that was teaching listening comprehension by activating students‟ schemata with pictures in prelistening stage, while the control group consisted of 38 students of grade VIII-B taught by using question and answer technique in CLL approach. The primary data of this research were collected from the students‟ scores of listening test. The primary data were collected from the post-test to compare the two different groups after treatment, and analyzed the result by using Independent sample T-Test (SPSS). Based on the calculation, the result of this research showed that the value of significant column of t-test table by using SPSS sofware, and the result was 0.017 which was lower than 0.05 (significant level of 5%). This means that the null hypothesis (H ) formulated: “There is no significant effect of activating the eighth grade students‟ schemata with pictures in pre-listening stage on their listening comprehension achievement at SMPN 2 Balung in the 2011/2012 academic year” was rejected, thus the alternative hypothesis: “There is a significant effect of activating the eighth grade students‟ schemata with pictures in pre-listening stage on their listening comprehension achievement at SMPN 2 Balung in the 2011/2012 academic year” was accepted. 0 The research results proved that there was a significant effect of activating the eighth grade students‟ schemata with pictures in pre-listening stage on their listening comprehension achivement at SMPN 2 Balung in the 2011/2012 academic year.