Conducting Classroom Survey as a Communicative Activity in Teaching Speaking

Conducting Classroom Survey as a Communicative Activity in Teaching Speaking

Speaking is one of the four skills that have to be mastered by students. Although they may be good at writing, listening and reading, it will be useless if they cannot use the language to communicate. Even thought the students have mastered a lot of vocabulary, they might seem get stuck in the middle of a conversation. Therefore, speaking English seems to be difficult for most students. In order to find out the difficulties to improve their speaking skill, a questionnaire was given to them. The questionnaire, which was conducted at English First (EF) at Jember, East Java, on the 20^th of January 2011 to twenty intermediate learners, had three following questions:

a.       Do you think that speaking English is difficult?

b.      What makes it difficult for you to speak English?

c.       How do you improve your speaking skill?

Base on the result of the questionnaire, for the first question most students said that speaking English was difficult. For the second question most of them stated that there was some factors that make speaking English difficult. There are as follows:

a.       They felt nervous whenever and wherever they spoke English because they were afraid of making mistake in pronunciation.

b.      They lacked vocabulary to express their feelings and opinions.

c.       They found it difficult to apply grammar rules which had been studied in the class in real life conversation.

d.      They didn’t have a partner with whom to speak English outside the class to improve their speaking skill.

e.       They were not confident to start a conversation in English.

In addition, third question they said that they had improved their speaking skill by trying to have conversation in English to both the teacher and friends in class.

            Even though most students have some difficulties in speaking, this fact seems to be neglected by most teachers in class. They seem to give more emphasis to reading, writing and grammar. In fact, if one is studying a language, one should be able to use it to convey message in life situation. Thus, being able to express oneself confidently and fluently in speech is one of the most important elements of teaching English.

THEORETICAL BASIS

Many language learners regard speaking ability as measure of knowing a language. These learners define fluency as the ability to converse with others, much more than the ability to read, write or comprehend oral language. They regard speaking the most important skill they can acquire, and they assess their progress in terms of their accomplishments in spoken communication (Burkart, 1998). According to Morley (1992), there are three goals of improving spoken English:

a.       To increase students’ self-confidence in speaking English and in listening to English,

b.      To increase students’ level of intelligibility in speaking English and their level of aural comprehension in listening to English,

c.       To increase students’ fluency and accuracy in speaking English

In order to achieve these goals, the teacher should be able to choose the right speaking activities in class. Good speaking activities can and should be highly motivating. If all students are participating fully and the teacher has set up the activity properly and can then give sympathetic and useful feedback, they will get tremendous satisfaction from it (Harmer, 1998).

One activity that can be used to build students’ confidence and to increase students’ fluency in speaking is a survey.  A survey activity can entail a number of speaking activities such as asking questions, discussions, and debates.

During the discussion, the students have the opportunity to express their views on a wide variety of subjects and to listen to the views of other students. Beside discussion and debate, survey also allows the students to have the group work and presentation. Group work can be useful as a number of groups can talk about the same subject or different aspects of the same subject, reporting their findings back to the class as a whole.

The last activity in conducting classroom survey is group presentation. In this session, every student should be encouraged to take part in the full range of the presentation.

In conclusion, a survey requires the students to take part in interview, discussion, debate, group work, and presentation activities. These circumstances make the students more confident to express their opinions and formulate their ideas.

Conclusion

v  Speaking English is one the four skills that have to be mastered by students. Therefore, a fluency to convey message in English is as a measure in speaking English skill.

v  Most of student regard that speaking English is more difficult than reading and listening because many student have lack of self-confident when they spoke English.