The teaching of
English at Senior High Schools is aimed to help students to be able to
communicate either in spoken or in written. In speaking competence, students
should be able to communicate in oral interpersonal text, transactional text
and monologue text. To do it, they should achieve some language aspects such as
grammar, vocabulary, pronunciation, comprehension, stress and intonation.
In
the preliminary observation on the English learning and teaching process in the
tenth two grade students of SMAK Sant Augustinus Kediri, it shows that most of
the students cannot speak or deliver their ideas in English. It was seen in the
mean score of pre-test of each indicator as the following, (1) the students
have a bit low comprehension because their mean scores of the comprehension is
73. It is still under the passing grade.It means that they still have
difficulty in comprehension; (2) the students still have very poor vocabulary
because their mean score of the vocabulary is 65. It means that they do not
understand what the teachers are talking; (3) they cannot talk fluently or they
have low competence in delivering ideas. It is seen in their mean score of the
fluency. It is 56; (4) the students have poor grammar achievement. It is seen
in their mean score of the grammar. It is 67. This showed that they have low
competence in constructing utterances in correct grammar, and (5) the last is
that they are still very weak in pronunciation. It is seen from their very low
achievement of stress and intonation. Their mean score of stress and intonation
is 55. They still speak using their mother tongue accent.
Referring
to students’ problems, there are some possible factors causing difficulties of
students in achieving speaking competence. Among others are: (1) the students
have low eagerness to speak, especially in participating in work discussion;
(2) some of the students do not get enough practice in speaking because of the
chance to speak is not available due to the big number of students in the class
; (3) the students do not get good enough models in pronouncing words. It causes
the students to have a very bad listening competence. Once they got the wrong
sound, it would be very hard to correct them unless they are given a very
special treatment; (4) the materials chosen by the teacher do not lead the
students to do any communicative activities. The teacher tend to prepare the
students to be able to do test at the end of the semester as well as possible;
(5) the time allocation for students to
practice speaking is limited by the wrong choice of the materials done by the
teachers at the very beginning. As a result, the teaching of speaking is given
less attention and the scores for the
speaking competence is taken from the teacher’s daily observation; (6) the lack
of techniques of teaching speaking and the improper choice of materials used by
the teacher; The six factors mentioned above make the English teaching –
learning process especially the teaching of speaking become worse.
Concerning with the problems caused by the factors mentioned before, the
suitable way to solve them is changing technique of teaching. There are some
new methods of teaching that propose some interesting techniques for improving
the speaking competence of the students. Talking Chips is one of them.
Considering a certain factor which affects most to the students’ failure in
having activities in speaking, “Talking Chips” technique is considered to be
the best one to overcome the students’ problems of lack of confidence in
speaking. Talking chips is a technique that emphasizes full and even
participation from all students. This technique encourages reticent students to
speak out and talkers to reflect. Talking chips are useful for helping students
to discuss controversial issues, and it is also useful to solve communication
or process problems, such as dominating or clashing group members.
There
are some strength why learning technique using Talking chips is considered to
be one of the best choices to improve students’ speaking competence. This
technique has characteristics as follows: (1) It needs full participation from
all members of the group discussion. Therefore, willing or not, each member of
the group gets his/her chance or turn to talk. By more practice, the students
will make up their ability in delivering ideas; (2) it provides authentic
familiar materials which make the students curious, interested in and motivated
to speak English, this familiarity will help them not to worry about their
intonation and stress; (3) The learning
Technique using ‘Talking Chips’ encourages the reticent students to get involved
in the discussion. The technique will help the students to maintain their
grammar.; (4) this eliminates the
students’ domination to the group. Since the procedures in the discussion using
‘Talking Chips’ can talk about new authentic materials. (5) then, the authentic
materials enable students to get, to update, and to memorize new vocabularies
easily (Barkley,2005, pp. 117 -120).
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