Language is the most important aspect in human interaction. People communicate and interact with others using the language. In widely community, English has become international language. Most of the communities in the whole world use English in order they can communicate with others who have different languages. From this, English language is important to be taught and learned by the students. And as the form of our government’s response toward this case, English language has been put in the educational system in our country, and it is taught from junior high school until university and becomes a compulsory subject.
English language as a foreign language has four skills; speaking, writing, reading, and listening. In teaching English, those skill must be served integratedly as much as possible. One of the those language skills that influence the language ability is speaking. Teaching speaking is considered to be difficult among the four skills. Chastain in Paisal, (2011: 1) states that learning to speak is obviously more difficult. It means that more effort is required by the students and various interesting activities are also required by the teacher. Furthermore, he states that it is not enough for the students to hear or to listen speech only. The teacher need to give the opportunities to the student to practice their oral language especially speaking.
In teaching English for speaking skill, the English teachers must be creative to design many communication activities in the classroom that urge and motivate students to use the language actively and productively. For example, in oral language class, the student should be served with conducive learning activity. So, they can practice English as well as possible. However, Byrne in Paisal, (2011: 1) states that the first task of the teacher is create the best condition for students to study. In other words, the teacher is responsible for the situation where the student can communicate orally with their classmates. Most of the students think that speaking English is really difficult because we should adapt among the written form and the pronounciation. We can see the fact that most of the Indonesian stuudents cannot perform speaking English well.
The observation result when the researcher conducted teaching practice at the second year students of SMA Negeri 1 Maiwa in class IPA 1 showed that speaking is the most frustating English skill for students. The students sometimes face many problem in learning speaking because many factors such as shy to speak, have low motivation, have less self confidence, afraid of making mistakes and etc. They sometimes understand about the topic or material but they are difficult to share and express their idea to others.Therefore, it is important to focus the teachers’ intention on the improvement to stimulate the students to speak. For this purpose, active learning will be demanded. This problem actually is a matter of teaching method that should be conducted by the teachers. The students are very hard to speak because they mostly less ideas to express. So, the teachers have to find out a special teaching method to facility the students to solving their problems .Based on this statement, the researcher chooses the Cooperative Learning Type Talking Stick Method to make the student become active and improve the speaking ability.
Cooperative learning is an approach to teaching that makes maximum use of cooperative activities involving pairs and small groups of learners in classroom. Cooperative learning, like collaborative learning, entail small group working on spesific task. This model is allow the interaction and transaction among the student in the learning process that meets the rules of view of constructivist. According to Lie (2008) learning with cooperative strategy is proved very effective in improving relationships between students. In practice the work of cooperative learning team is systematically structure. So that, there is a positive interdependence among the members in the groups. In group, the members feel that they work together for emphasizes that “in a well-functioning cooperative group there is a sense of join responsibility where learners care about and get commited together”.
In cooperative learning there are many kind of learning models such as Jigsaw, Two Stay Two Stray, Group Investigation, Talking Stick and others. Among the learning models mentioned above , there is Talking Stick which is developed by Spencer Kagan (1992: 1). It is a group of study that student learnt independently from one another, each student has the same chance to express their ideas and concern with equal participant of students.
Based on the background above, the writer is interested in ““Using Cooperative Learning Type Talking Stick Method to Improve the Speaking Ability of The Second Year Students at SMA Negeri 1 Maiwa Kabupaten Enrekang.”
B. Problem Statement
Based on the previous background, the researcher formulates the research question as follow:
1. How is the speaking ability of the second year students of SMA Negeri 1 Maiwa Kabupaten Enrekang before and after using talking stick method?
2. Is the use of Talking Stick Method effective to improve the speaking ability at the second year students of SMA Negeri 1 Maiwa Kab.Enrekang?
C. Objective of the Research
In relating to the problem statements above, the objectives of the research are to find out:
1. The students’ speaking ability at the second year of SMA Negeri 1 Maiwa Kabupaten Enrekang before using Talking stick method.
2. The Students’ speaking ability at the second year of SMA Negeri 1 Maiwa Kabupaten Enrekang after using Talking stick method.
3. The effectiveness of Talking stick method in improving students’ speaking ability at the second year students SMA Negeri 1 Maiwa Kabupaten Enrekang .
D. Significance of the Research
The result of the research is expected to be a piece of meaningful and useful information for the English teacher in teaching process, particularly in improving the students’ speaking ability as a part on English skills. This research also expected to be reference in developing of teaching learning process especially in speaking.
E. Scope of the Research
This research is limited to the teaching of English to the second year students of SMA Negeri 1 Maiwa Kabupaten Enrekang in academic year of 2012/2013. The writer will focused on improving the students’ ability to speak English and the students’ interest in the process of teaching and learning using Talking Stick Method.
A. Operational Definition of Variables
1. Talking Stick Method
Talking Stick method is developed by Spencer Kagan (1992: 1). It is a group of study that student learnt independently from one another, each student has the same chance to express their ideas and concern with equal participant of students. It is one kinds of Cooperative learning method. According to Robert E. Slavin in Mustari (2010: 12), cooperative learning is one of the learning methods where student are engaged in groups when they receive material from a teacher or do their task or assignment. Cooperative learning is an approach to organizing classroom activities into academic and social learning experience. Student must in group to complete the two sets of task collectively. Everyone succeeds when group succeeds (Brown & Ciuffetelli Parker 2010 )
According to Knockwood (1992), in Mi’kmaw culture, Talking stick is a piece of wood used in Talking Stick Ceremony. Anyone with the talking stick would have the right to talk as long as they need to say without fear of being interrupted with question, criticism or scolding. Hence it becomes signifier democracy. In OSLC classroom, the talking stick can be any ordinary stick of any kind or any size. Whoever has the talking stick has the right to talk, and else would keep silent and listen.
. Passing the talking stick is a powerful method of creating deep communication between people. Use this method when you want the students to listen to others as part of a learner-centred curriculum. This method takes the focus off the teacher, as the sole purveyor of knowledge. And by using it, students are encouraged to learn from each other.
The teacher can provide language materials with simple, everyday dialog and situations, whereby the students can role-play the parts while in possession of the talking stick. (Who decides who is to hold the stick, and when?)
Ensure that when one person is holding the stick and talking, everyone else must listen attentively and without judgement. Even if a listener disagrees with what is said, they must not show irritation, annoyance, contempt or any other discouragement.
There are some steps implementation of talking stick, which are:
· Whoever holds the talking stick has within his hands the power of word.
· Begin with one person holding the talking stick, who then passes the stick to somebody else,
· Others listen attentively because they don’t know if they will be passed the stick next.
· Decide how long the person can hold the stick.
· Identify a timekeeper.
· Chairs in a cicle.
2. Speaking Ability
Chastain in Paisal (2011: 8), speaking is a productive skill. As such, its development is undertaken after the receptive skill of listening comprehension, and perhaps of reading is always somewhat behind of receptive skill. How far the productive skill language behind the receptive depends upon the learner, how far he has advanced in his language learning and linguistics complexity of the material.
Nunan (1991: 8) states that “ oral communication is a two way process between speaker and listener and involves the producyive skill of speaking and the receptive skill of understanding (listening with understanding).”
Widdowson (1983: 3) describes that usage as one aspect of performance in which language users demonstrates his ability to use hs knowledge of lingustics rules for effective communication for transferring ideas or information to others. It is the most essential way for the speaker to express himself through the language.
A. Method of the Research
1. Research Design
The design is pre-experimental design with pre-test and pos-test design. The comparison between the pretest and post-test score depends on the success of the treatment. The design is:
O1 = The result of the students’ pre-test
X = The treatment by using Talking stick method
O2 = The result of the students’ post-test
To take clear illustration on the research variable, the variable was divided into :
1. Independent Variable
The indepedent variable in this research use Talking Stick Method.
2. Dependent Variable
The dependent variable in this research is the students’ ability in speaking English.
3. Population and Sample
To know more about the condition of population in composing this thesis so that for the first time the researcher explain definition of population, (According to Suharsimi Arikunto: 2006) has a view that population is the total of the research subject. The population also means as objective to get and to collect the data.
The population of this research is all the students in the second year of SMA Negeri 1 Maiwa in the academic year of 2012-2013 which consist of 120 students.
In this research samples will be taken by using pusposive sampling technique. Purposive sampling is taking sample based on the specific purpose (Arikunto, 2006). The sample of the research will take one class of second year student in class IPA 1 of SMA Negeri 1 Maiwa Kabupaten Enrekang which consisted of 35 students.
4. Instrument of the Research
At present of the instrument of the research that the writer used in this thesis is Speaking test
The speaking test is given to the students to know their ability in speaking. The test is divided in two types, namely pre-test and post-test. The pretest is the speaking test given before treatment, in this test; the students are asked to deliver free speech. The second test is posttest that is given after treatment.
5. Procedures of Collecting Data
The following procedure used to collect the data will be:
Pre-test will give to the students to know their ability in speaking. The pre-test was the speaking test given before treatment. As a pre-test the students are asked to deliver free speech about their family or the teacher gives them topic and the students give comment about it.
After giving the pre-test the students will be taught by using Talking stick method. The treatments take place within 4 meeting and it takes 90 minutes for each meeting.
Post-test is the last procedure in this study. It was given to the students after treatment. The post-test will be conducted to find out the students achievement and their progress. It will use to know the result of treatments; it will also use to know weather there is an improvement or not.