Improving the students’ speaking ability through information gap
technique
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 conducted at the eighth year students of SMPN, the researcher faced many
problems in teaching learning English. The crucial problems were the students’
problems in speaking. The problems were; the 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. The second, the students were afraid of making mistake in
speaking English. It indicates that the students had limited vocabulary. The
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 information gap technique. The
technique was designed to create the students’ interest to learn with pleasant
method. The core of information gap technique is corporation between groups and
shared.
Information gap is a useful activity in which
one person has information that the other lacks. Another advantage of
information gap activities is that students are forced to negotiate meaning
because they must make what they are saying comprehensible to others in order
to accomplish the task Neu and Reeser, 1997 in Sari (2008:3)
Based
on the statements above, the researcher used information gap technique to
overcome the students’ problems in speaking. The researcher was interested to
apply this technique to teach speaking at
