Improving the Students
Speaking Ability Through Cue Card (Action Research)
CHAPTER 1
INTRODUCTION
A. Background
Language as the tool of communication has an
important role to reveal an intention to someone else. People will be able to
express their thought and feeling by using language. Language, communication
and life can not be separated. Language can be applied in many aspects, such
as: education, society, politics, economics, and culture. One of the ways in
communication is through speaking.
Speaking is one
of the important and essential skills that must be practised to communicate
orally. By speaking people are able to know what kinds of situations the world.
People who have ability in speaking will be better in sending and receiving
information or message to another. Speaking is the process of building and
sharing meaning through the use of verbal and non verbal symbol in various
contexts.
According to Stevick
(1982: 103) speaking refers to the gap between linguistic expertise and
teaching methodology. Linguistic expertise concerns with language structure and
language content. Teaching speaking is not like listening, reading, and
writing. It needs habit formation because it is a real communication. The speaking
needs to be practiced as often as possible. It is not like writing and reading
but speaking must be practiced directly in full expression.
Related to the statements above, the researcher did
pre - observation that was done at the eighth year students of SMPN
27 Makassar, the researcher faced many
problems in teaching learning English. The crucial problems were the students’
problems in speaking. The problems were; first, the students always did
mistakes in grammar and pronunciation aspect. Basically, they only spoke
English but they did not pay attention to the sentence structure and correct
pronunciation. Second, the students were afraid of making mistake in speaking
English. It indicates that the students had limited vocabulary. Third, the
students were difficult to speak fluently because they were seldom to practice
their English language.
Based
on the result interview of the English teacher at the eighth year students of
SMP- I stated that the mean score of the students’ achievement
in speaking English was very low. It was about 5.5 mean score and the target
score that would be achieved was 7.5.
From the problems above the researcher applied
one of teaching techniques. That was an interesting technique and it could
improve the student’s speaking ability, namely Cue Card. The technique was designed to
create the students’ interest to learn with pleasant method. The core of Cue Card is
corporation between groups and shared.
Cue card is introduced as one of the
teaching media. Cue card is card with words or picture on, which are used to
encourage the students to respond (Harmer, 2001:134). Cue card is interesting
due to its simplicity and attractiveness. Besides inexpensive, the process of
making it is not quite
complicated. A teacher, sometimes, needs creativity to make the cards more
attractive. Cue card as the modification
of picture has many advantages, one of which is that it is clearly
visible. Thus, when students are asked to describe something/someone in detail,
cue cards can help them to produce the description easily
Based
on the statements above, the researcher used cue cards to overcome the
students’ problems in speaking. The researcher was interested to apply this
technique to teach speaking at the eighth year students of SMP in
order to improve their ability in speaking.
