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INTRODUCTION
are not enough for students, but so all other languages element of linguistics
appropriately spoken language.
Furthermore, recent trends in English as a Second Language or English as
a Foreign Language (ESL/EFL) curriculum design and pedagogy have stressed on
the importance of teaching communicative strategies and of teaching the
functional use of language3 that the goal of teaching and learning English is to be
well in communication. Therefore, of all the four skills (listening, speaking,
reading, and writing), speaking seems intuitively the most important: people who
know a language are referred to as speakers of that language4. Because of this
reason, often parents undoubtedly spend amount of their money only to ensure
that their children have gotten a good English program.
In teaching and learning process basically, English teachers have begun
attempting to teach foreign languages in a way that was more similar to first
language acquisition. However, in fact their endeavor seems completely difficult
to encourage students to speak English. Feeling awkward to always say things in
English sometimes attack students that it becomes problem toward English
teaching. In addition, when attempting to speak, learners must muster their
thoughts and encode those ideas in the vocabulary and syntactic structures of the
target language5. Therefore, it brings about uncomfortable to use the target
language toward students eventually.
To deal with this case, the teacher is challenged to be as creative as
possible to provide opportunities for students to expose and to reinforce students
speaking skill. To encourage students to practice their English, some English
teachers sometimes utilize games, role plays, dramas and other activities, by
which students learn English with pleasant without any frustration. Such those
activities may help students to always expose their ability to produce sentences
and to use appropriate expressions based on the situation created by the teacher in
the classroom. It usually makes students enthusiast, moreover when the teacher
gets them to participate the activity that it challenges them to compete with other
students. It not only makes students attempt to be the best from others, but also be
a chance for them to attaint scores through given feedback.
Based on the problem above, as for the writer, it is very important to seek
the way to overcome students problem and figure out the difficulty they face in
speaking skill. Therefore, a research is carried out to analyze and to find the
overcoming of students problem. In this case, the students of VII.B are chosen
as the subject of the study, because they are considered as the lowest in speaking
skill than the other classes based on the interview toward the English teacher as
well as the students. Here, the writer tries to propose a strategy in teaching
English especially teaching speaking namely communication game.
Communication game is a set of games which it is designed to provoke
students communication in the classroom. On these games also includes
information gaps that demands students to talk with others to find the similarities
or differences among different pictures and etc. These games not only encourage
student to be actively participated in the activities occur in the classroom, but also
enhance their confidence to talk with their friends. As it is stated by HennerStanchina and Riley (1978) that in Communicative Language Teaching (CLT)
students are expected to interact primarily with each other rather than with the
teacher6, and it is very important for learners to feel comfortable with each other
and confident in themselves.7
From those statements above, the writer would like to conduct a research
to improve students speaking ability by using games that provoke them to be as
communicative as possible under the title Improving Students Speaking
Ability through Communication Games (A Classroom Action Research at First
Grade of MTs. Tarbiyatus Salafiyah Pesawahan)
1.2 Limitation of Problem
To make this research easy to be discussed, the writer limits and
formulates this research as follow:
1 The Limitation of the problem:
The implementation of communication games
in teaching