THE EFFECTIVENESS OF
USING DIRECT METHOD TO IMPROVE STUDENTS’ SPEAKING ABILITY
(A Classroom Action
Research)
CHAPTER I
INTRODUCTION
A.
Background of the Study
Human being needs each other. As a social culture, human
needs to communicate with language as a means of
communication with other people. Language is
used by people to express and receive some information, message, emotions
and so on. There are many kinds of languages used by people such as
English, Dutch, India, French, Spanish, Arab, Indonesia, etc. It depends on
where the people live. English is a foreign language in Indonesia.
One of the ways of communication
is through speaking. For most people,
mastering ―the art‖ of speaking is the single most important aspect of learning
a second or foreign language, and success is
measured in terms of the ability to
carry out a conversation in the language (Fauziati, 2008: 126).
Nowadays English is an important language. It is the key to
international currency of technology, science, as well
as commerce. As an international language,
English has gained its popularity all over the world including Indonesia.
In the past English was only taught in high school. In current years, the
teaching of English is expanding into primary schools.
English consists of four basic skills that students must
master, they are speaking, writing, reading and listening.
The first skill is speaking, it controls
to learn and to develop of an individual‘s
personality. The second one is writing, it
is a partial representation of units of language expression. This
is the chief means by which thought, ideas and knowledge are preserved. The
third is reading, it is to grasp language patterns from their
written representation. The fourth is listening;
through listening, we build knowledge by taking in new
information (Robert Lado, 1983: 143).
Speaking is in many ways an
undervalued skill. Perhaps this is because
we can almost all speak, and so take the skill too much for granted.
Speaking is often thought of as a popular form of expression which uses the
unprestigious colloquial register: literary skills are on the
whole more prized. The fact that speaking
is transient and improvised, and can therefore be viewed as
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