IMPROVING THE STUDENTS’ SPEAKING 2 ACHIEVEMENT THROUGH PICTURE JIGSAW AT THE ISLAMIC UNIVERSITY OF JEMBER

Abstract

Speaking skill is one of the language skills that is considered as a productive skill. The main purpose of teaching speaking is to help students have good ability to communicate the ideas or opinions in spoken language. In fact, many students of university level find that speaking is one of the difficult skills. Whereas, speaking a foreign language is one of the challenging activities to enter the global era. Therefore, we should have good creativity in teaching speaking for students as our young generation. One of the strategies to solve this problem is by applying media in teaching learning process of speaking. This Classroom Action Research (CAR) with Cycle model was applied in this research. The action was intended to improve the students’ speaking 2 achievement through picture jigsaw at the Islamic University of Jember. This classroom action research was conducted in two cycles, in which each cycle covered four main stages of activities namely; preparation of the action, implementation of the action, class observation and evaluation, data analysis and the reflection of the action. Then, each cycle was conducted in three meetings, two meetings for the action and one meeting for the speaking test. The primary data about the students’ speaking achievement were gained from the speaking test that was done after the actions in each cycle and class observation of each cycle were over. Meanwhile, the supporting data were got from interview and documentation. The actions were considered successful as 75% of the students did each indicator of observation stated in the checklist and the mean score of the speaking test was at least in the good category 70. From the results of classroom observation in Cycle I, it was known that there was 60% (9 students) of 15 students who were actively involved in the teaching learning process of speaking in the first meeting and there was 73,3 % (11 students) who were actively involved in the teaching learning process of speaking in the second meeting. This condition showed that the percentage of students’ involvement in the teaching learning process of speaking in Cycle I had achieved the target of this research that is ≥75% of the students were actively involved in the teaching learning process of speaking. Meanwhile, the results of students’ speaking test that was done after the actions in Cycle I showed that there was 60 % (9 students) of 15 students who got score 70 and the mean score was 70. Therefore, it could be concluded that Cycle 1 was not successful because it did not achieve the target required of product evaluation that is 75% students got score 70 or more. Therefore, the actions in Cycle I was continued to the next cycle by revising some aspects in Cycle I. In the revision, the researcher and the English lecturer changed the topic given. From the results of classroom observation in Cycle 2, it was known that there was 73,3% (11 students) of 15 students who were actively involved in the teaching learning process of speaking in the first meeting and there was 80 % (12 students) who were actively involved in the teaching learning process of speaking in the second meeting. This condition means that the percentage of students’ involvement in the teaching learning process of speaking in Cycle 2 achieved the target of this research that is ≥75% of the students were actively involved in the teaching learning process of speaking. Meanwhile, the results of students’ speaking test that was done after the actions in Cycle 2 showed that there was 80 % (12 students) of 15 students who got score 70 and the mean score was 70. Therefore, in could be concluded that the implementation of the action in Cycle 2 could improve the students speaking achievement and the students’ active participation. This success was caused by the teaching learning process of speaking that had used media (Picture Jigsaw). Moreover, the results of this research also supported the previous research finding by Liswiadji (2000) who reported that the use of pictures (including picture jigsaw) could give significant effects to the students’ achievement. Based on the result above, it was concluded that the use of Picture Jigsaw as teaching media in teaching learning process of speaking could increase the students’ speaking 2 achievement and the students’ active participation. Then, it was suggested to the speaking lecturer to use picture jigsaw as the alternative of speaking media in teaching learning process in order to improve the students’ speaking achievement since the picture jigsaw could facilitate the students to speak more in an interesting way and to keep their mind active with their imagination. Therefore, the students could be more motivated in their speaking class.