IMPROVING STUDENTS’ LISTENING ABILITY THROUGH
DICTATION TECHNIQUE AT THE FIRST YEAR STUDENTS
OF SMA NEGERI 1 TANJUNGBINTANG
(Script)
By
FATIMAH MULYA SARI
LAMPUNG UNIVERSITY BANDAR LAMPUNG
ABSTRACT
IMPROVING STUDENTS’ LISTENING ABILITY THROUGH DICTATION TECHNIQUE AT THE FIRST YEAR STUDENTS OF SMA
NEGERI 1 TANJUNGBINTANG
By
FATIMAH MULYA SARI
In general, listening is considered as a difficult language skill to be mastered by the students. There are many techniques that has been proved effective for
improving the students’ listening ability, one of them is dictation. Therefore, the
objective of this research is to know whether there is a significant improvement of
the students’ listening ability after being taught through dictation technique. The population of this research was the first year students of SMA Negeri 1 Tanjungbintang that consists of seven classes and two classes were chosen as the experimental class and the try-out class. X-1 was for the experimental class and X-3 was for the try-out class. One group pre-test and post-test design was carried
out to know whether there is a significant difference of students’ achievement in
listening ability before and after being taught through dictation technique.
The result of this research proved that there is a significant difference of students’
achievement in listening ability before and after being taught through dictation technique. The total score of pre-test was 2068 and post-test was 2592. The increase was 524 points. The mean score of pre-test was 57.44 and post-test was 72.00. By comparing between the mean of pre-test and post-test, it can be found
that the increase of the mean was 14.56. It proved that the students’ scores
increase significantly because p<0.05 (p=0.000). Based on the data, the researcher
concluded that there is a significant difference of students’ achievement in
listening ability before and after being taught through dictation technique. Therefore, dictation technique is recommended to be used by teachers to improve
IMPROVING STUDENTS’ LISTENING ABILITY THROUGH
DICTATION TECHNIQUE AT THE FIRST YEAR STUDENTS
OF SMA NEGERI 1 TANJUNGBINTANG
By
FATIMAH MULYA SARI
A Script
Submitted in a Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for S-1 Degree
in
The Language and Arts Department of Teacher Training and Education Faculty
LAMPUNG UNIVERSITY BANDAR LAMPUNG
Research Title : IMPROVING STUDENTS’ LISTENING ABILITY
THROUGH DICTATION TECHNIQUE AT THE
FIRST YEAR STUDENTS OF SMA NEGERI 1 TANJUNGBINTANG
Student’s Name : Fatimah Mulya Sari
Student’s Number : 0913042042
Department : Language and Arts Education Program Study : English Department
Faculty : Teacher Training and Education
APPROVED BY Advisory Committee
Advisor Co-Advisor
Dr. Muhammad Sukirlan, M.A. Drs. Ramlan Ginting Suka
NIP 19641212 199003 1 003 NIP 19570721 198603 1 003
The Chairperson of
Language and Arts Education Department
ADMITTED BY
1. Examination Committee
Chairperson : Dr. Muhammad Sukirlan, M.A. ...
Examiner : Drs. Ujang Suparman, M.A., Ph.D. ...
Secretary : Drs. Ramlan Ginting Suka ...
2. The Dean of Teacher Training and Education Faculty
Dr. H. Bujang Rahman, M.Si. NIP 19600315 198503 1 003
CURRICULUM VITAE
Fatimah Mulya Sari was born in Bandar Lampung, on February 16, 1991. She is the third child of five siblings from the lovely parents, Sarijan and Wati. She entered TK Sriwijaya in 1996. After graduating, she entered SD Negeri 1 Way Dadi in 1997 and graduated in 2003 as the top ten best students. Then, she continued her study at SMP Negeri 29 Bandar Lampung. In the second grade, she became the top twenty finalist of Biology Competition 2004 followed by whole junior high school in Bandar Lampung. She graduated from the junior high school in 2006. After that, she entered SMA Negeri 5 Bandar Lampung and finished her study in 2009.
DEDICATION
I proudly present this research paper to: My lovely parents, Sarijan and Wati.
My beloved siblings; Jefri Andi, A.Md., Meri Luviana, S.P., Lukman Nawawi, and Mike Puspita.
MOTTO
The best thing about the future is that it only comes one day at a time.
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
Praise be to Allah S.W.T., the Most Gracious and the Most Merciful. By the blessings and mercies, the researcher eventually can complete the research paper entitled “Improving Students’ Listening Ability Through Dictation Technique at the First Year Students of SMA Negeri 1 Tanjungbintang”. This research paper is submitted to English Education Program, Language and Arts Department of Teacher Training and Education Faculty of Lampung University in partial fulfillment of the requirement for the S-1 degree.
First of all, I would like to express my special appreciation to my first advisor, Dr. Muhammad Sukirlan, M.A., and my second advisor, Drs. Ramlan Ginting Suka who had contributed in giving their advices, comments, evaluations, guidances, and suggestions during the completion of this script. Their advisory make me understand and reveal the core of the script. I am also grateful to Drs. Ujang Suparman, M.A., Ph.D., as the examiner, who gave many input and improvement of this research paper.
I also express my deep gratitude to the Principal of SMA Negeri 1 Tanjungbintang, Drs. Mirzal Effendi, who gave me permission in conducting the research. Great thankfulness also goes to English teacher of SMA Negeri 1 Tanjungbintang, Thomas Sudibya, S.Pd., who let me conduct the research and took the data from his class. And additional thanks goes to the students of SMA Negeri 1 Tanjungbintang, especially for X-1 and X-3 class, for their willingness to cooperate and participate in this research.
Afterwards, I dedicate a special thanks to my beloved parents, Sarijan and Wati, who always give me their pure love and help me understand about life, love, and values. My thankfulness is also dedicated to my beloved brothers and sisters, and my big family who play a big role in my life and always give me the biggest support, affection, and never ending prayers for my success.
Bandar Lampung, March 2013
LIST OF CONTENTS 1.1. Background of the Problems... 1
1.2. Identification of the Problems... 3
1.3. Limitation of the Problem... 4
1.4. Formulation of the Problem... 4 2.1. Review of Previous Related Research... 7
2.2. Review of Related Literature... 9
LIST OF TABLES
Page Table
1. Table Specification of Micro Skill in Pre-test..…..…..……….……... 32
2. Table Specification of Micro Skill in Post-test...………... 32
3. Table of Distribution of the Students’ Score of the Pre-test in the Experimental Class…………...…... 40
4. Table of Distribution of the Students’ Pre-test Achievement in each Elements of Micro skill…………...…... 41
5. Table of Distribution of the Students’ Score of the Post-test in the Experimental Class…………...…... 42
6. Table of Distribution of the Students’ Post-test Achievement in each Elements of Micro skill…………...…... 43
7. Table of the Increase from Pre-test to Post-test….………..….……... 44
8. Increase from Pre-test to Post-test for each elements of Micro Skill... 44
LIST OF APPENDICES
Page Appendix
1. Reliability analysis of upper group and lower group try-out test... 60
2. Reliability analysis of try-out test... 62
3. The reliability of try-out test...….…………...……... 63
4. Level of difficulty and discrimination power of the try-out test... 64
5. The result of students’ score of pretest-posttest in experimental class... 65
6. Distribution of the Students’ Pre-test Achievement in Elements of Micro skill…………...…... 66
7. Distribution of the Students’ Post-test Achievement in each Elements of Micro skill……....……...…... 67
8. Table of distribution of the pre-test in experimental class... 70
9. Table of distribution of the post-test in experimental class... 71
10. Random Test of the pre-test and post-test in experimental class... 72
11. The normality of the pre-test and the post-test in experimental class... 73
I. INTRODUCTION
This chapter presents an overview of this research and it deals with the reasons for conducting the research. It consists of eight sections, i.e. background of the problems, identification of the problems, limitation of the problem, formulation of the problem, objective of the research, uses of the research, scope of the research, and definition of terms.
1.1. Background of the Problems
Indonesia, which uses English as a foreign language, introduces English from the kindergarten level up to the university level. In the schools, the implementation of School Based Curriculum (KTSP) has a function as the instrument to guide teaching learning activities towards the main goals of national education.
Based on the researcher’s pre-observation conducted in SMA Negeri 1 Tanjungbintang, it was found out that the students have insufficient ability in listening. In this program, the researcher taught listening test by using audio records. From that activity, the students did not seem to be interested in the material being taught. During the teaching-learning process, they chatted with their partner. They also seemed to be bored and sleepy. This happened because they did not get the message that they heard from the record and they could not understand the meaning of words.
Moreover, the students also could not understand the material well and they usually felt a loss when they listened to new text that was given in listening activity. In addition, they were not able to predict the sound, intonation, and stress since the speaker usually spoke too fast. Expecting them to understand the material of listening, the researcher had to replay the record at least three times or more and sometimes the researcher had to stop the tape only to tell or explain unfamiliar words and about the sentences of the text. As a result, this condition affected the students ability in listening.
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students. The students might not be motivated to listen the materials and learn English.
To overcome all the school problems is beyond the capacity of this research. Therefore, the researcher is interested to solve the problems by using dictation technique. Dictation might be useful to improve the students’ listening ability. Dictation is one of teaching technique which might be used for any level. By using this technique, the teacher may easily realize the students’ low competence in comprehending listening as well as the weaknesses of the previous teaching method. It may be an easy and interesting technique for English students to improve their listening ability. The students do not only pay attention to the sound of the words read by the teacher but also understand about the meaning and be able to transfer the dictated passages to their graphical representations.
Based on the whole background above, this research is entitled “Improving
Students’ Listening Ability through Dictation Technique at the First Year
Students of SMA Negeri 1 Tanjungbintang.”
1.2. Identification of the Problems
Based on background of the problems stated above, the researcher identifies some problems as follows:
1. In the school, there is no language laboratory. Meanwhile, English books might be lack of sources in the school library.
3. The students lack motivation to listen an English monolog text because they think that the material of listening is difficult and boring.
4. The students become bored with listening materials. It might be caused by the teacher who uses less interesting materials.
5. The technique that is used by the teacher might be not effective for the students.
6. The technique might be less appropriate for the students’ need.
1.3. Limitation of the Problem
Based on identification of the problems stated above, the researcher limits the problem concerning the technique that is used by the teacher. The researcher is interested in investigating whether there is any difference of students’ listening ability if they are taught by using dictation technique.
1.4. Formulation of the Problem
Based on limitation of the problems above, this research attempts to answer the
following problem: “Is there any significant improvement of the students’
listening ability after being taught through dictation technique?”
1.5. Objective of the Research
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1.6. Uses of the Research
The uses of this research are expected to be useful both theoretically and practically.
Theoretically
The uses of this research are as follows:
1. This research can be useful for supporting the previous theory about dictation. 2. This research can be used as reference for the next researcher who will
concentrate on students’ listening ability by using dictation.
Practically
The result of this research hopefully can give information for teacher who may apply dictation as one of technique that can be used in practicing listening so that it can develop students to improve students’ listening ability and teacher’s performance.
1.7. Scope of the Research
The researcher focuses the research on using dictation technique for teaching listening. Considering research question, this research is limited only to find out the significant improvement of students’ listening ability by using dictation technique.
listening is delimited on listening sub-skills of micro skill that is the students’ understanding of intonation pattern, recognition of function and structure, cohesive devices, detect sentence constituents, and recognizing discourse markers because the students still have insufficient ability in that sub-skills.
1.8. Definition of Terms
Below are some key terms clarified in order to avoid misunderstanding, as follows:
Improvement
Improvement is the process of improving or being better.
Listening
Listening is one of fundamental language skills which includes the process of receiving what speaker says, constructing meaning, and responding from something listeners hear.
Listening ability
Listening ability in this study can be referred to the capability of students to listen and respon to questions in a listening test.
Dictation
Dictation is a simple technique that the listener listens to an oral text and write down what they hear, the passage may be presented more than once and it needs to be presented in segments or information units.
II. LITERATURE REVIEW
This chapter presents two major points; review of previous related research and review of related literature. In detail, a number of concepts are reviewed here such as concept of listening, concept of teaching listening, concept of dictation, theoretical assumption, and hypothesis.
2.1. Review of Previous Related Research
There have been several studies dealing with the teaching of listening in the classroom. This section discusses the previous studies dealing with the matters being discussed.
group, 6.00, (t(58)= 20.59, p<.001). Thus, there is a significant difference between the gain scores of the experimental and control groups. This indicates that the experimental group that took dictation outperformed the control group in their performance on the listening comprehension test.
The second research is teaching listening comprehension through picture dictation by Zuhar (2008: 33) from Lampung University. This research found that picture
dictation had increased the students’ listening achievement in experimental class
significantly. The total score of the pre-test 1950 has increased to 2705 in post-test, there was an increase for about 755 points after being given treatments. The result of the hypothesis test showed that the hypothesis is accepted (t-ratio>t-table, t-ratio=9.8; t-table=2.042). Thus, it can be concluded that there is a significant
increase of the students’ listening achievement that is taught through picture dictation.
And the last research is increasing students’ listening comprehension achievement through dictation technique by Meliasari (2011: 53) from Lampung University. The research was a quantitative study which used true experimental design based on pretest-posttest control group design. The research was conducted in SMP Negeri 8 Bandar Lampung and involved two classes as the experimental class and as the control class. Based on the results, there was a significant increase of
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53.44 up to 60.11 or increase 6.67. So, it can be concluded that the treatments by using dictation technique in the experimental class had better effect on the
students’ achievement in listening comprehension.
Considering those researches above, the researcher thinks that there is still one issue which has not been investigated, that is, teaching dictation technique in senior high school students. Therefore, the researcher entitled the research
“Improving Students’ Listening Ability through Dictation Technique at the First Year Students of SMA Negeri 1 Tanjungbintang.”
2.2. Review of Related Literature
Considering the review of previous related research, the researcher is going to propose a review of related literature which has a relationship with this research as follows:
2.2.1. Concept of Listening
A great deal of time that people spent for listening increases today. People spend a half of the communication in listening. Listening is not a simple thing because it is an important medium of information gathering in daily life and used most frequently. It has been acknowledged by Steil cited in Simonds and Cooper (2011) who states that people spend 70% of their waking time for participating in some form of communication. He adds that 9% is spent for writing, 16% for reading, 30% for speaking, and 45% for listening. Schwartz (1998) also affirms that adults spend almost half their communication time listening, and students may receive as much as 90% of information in their school through listening to instructors and to one another. In addition, Brown (2004: 247) points out that students always do more listening than speaking in the classroom.
Based on the statements stated above, it can be inferred that listening is an inseparable part in human life. In communication, speaker, listener, and message are being three basic elements. Communication cannot happen successfully if the message is not understood. Communication will happen if the listener gets what the speaker says and responses according to the message. Listeners have to process the messages as they come. Nevertheless, no communication process is complete without listening. It is not wondering that listening is very needed and used much more than any other language skill.
2.2.1.1. The Process of Listening
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to actively provide knowledge or information that is already known. McKeating cited in McErlain (1999) affirms that the listener passes through certain processes in constructing a message. The first is perception of sounds. It relates to the process of describing speech sounds. In order to divide the sounds into the flow of speech into meaningful parts, the listeners use linguistic knowledge by dividing the sounds into familiar parts, recognizing and using intonation to indicate word limits.
The second process is decoding. The decoding relates to the means by which listeners comprehend the message in chunks and not just sentences. Each chunk should be recognized as meaningful and understood on reception and held in short term memory to be related to what has gone before or what follows. Out of this process comes pieces of information which can be stored in the long-term memory for later recall. The process depends on recognizing lexical meaning, perceiving grammatical relationships signalled by word order, tense markers, structure words, cohesive devices, etc. The last is prediction and selection. The prediction relates to the way of listeners to listen without exerting much energy to catch every word. The selection relates to the process of refining information and retrieving relevant information in a mass of data.
and understanding are the steps which are defined as the sharing and understanding meaning. Meanwhile, the steps of responding and remembering may or may not follow, since the listeners may want to respond or to remember the message immediately or later. Each step is a requirement to the rest of the listening process and all of the steps are important to deliver an effective listening.
Based on the statements above, it is obvious that listening is a very complex and interactive process. It also possesses essential steps. By understanding the process of listening, it gives an important lesson on how to be an effective listener. It also will help listener to know the message. The listener can use this process to be a strategy to develop their skill in listening ability.
2.2.1.2. The Types of Listening
There are many types of listening proposed by researchers. Generally, the division of listening types depends on different situations. Kline (1996) categorizes some types of listening, they are:
1. Informative listening.
This type needs the listener to understand and concern the message from the
speaker’s intent. This type also occurs in all our areas of our lives. For
example, the students listen to the teacher’s instructions and what they learn depends on how well they listen.
2. Relationship listening.
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type of relationship listening is therapeutic listening where counselors,
medical personnel, or other professionals allow a person to talk through problem. For example, someone is listening to friends or acquaintances telling their problem or feeling.
3. Appreciative listening.
This type shows the response of the listener to what the listener listens to. For example, listening to various genre of music or listening to speakers in television or radio.
4. Critical listening.
This type is very important and much needed in many situations. This type is required in a democracy for example, politicians, the media, salesmen, advocates of policies and procedures, and financial, emotional, intellectual, physian, and spiritual needs. Effective critical listening depends on ethos or source of credibility, logos or logical argument, and pathos or psychological appeals. We can use this type on the job, in the family, in the school, etc.
5. Discriminative listening.
This type may be the most important type than the other four. The listener is required to be sensitive to changes in the speaker’s rate, volume, force, pitch, and emphasis. This type allows critical listeners to more accurately judge
Based on the type of listening above, dictation technique is relevant to the type of informative listening and discriminative listening. Students who get dictation as
informative listening have to listen to the teacher’s instructions and get the gist or
message from the teacher. What they learn depends on how well they listen or what they get from the message that was given by the teacher. Moreover, the informative listener can detect and identify the meaning differences. While in
discriminative listening, students have to be active to see the change of teacher’s
rate, volume, pitch, etc. The listening types can be synchronized with the given material of listening and related to English curriculum at school. Those can be used to get the meaning of what students listened, help students to be concentrated on the content of message, and comprehend the meaning of the message.
2.2.2. Concept of Teaching Listening
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In teaching listening, teacher commonly uses the technique that involves one approach only, whether bottom-up processing or top-down processing approach. Nevertheless, it is better for teacher to use a technique which involves both listening processing. It is acknowledged by Brown ( 2001: 260) who states that one of principles for designing listening technique is by including both bottom-up and top-down processing. Here they are;
a. Bottom-Up Processing
According to Brown (2001), bottom-up processing refers to sounds, words, grammatical relationship, lexical meanings to get a “message”. It focuses on sounds, words, intonation, grammatical structures, and other components of spoken language. In other words, bottom-up processing refers to deriving the meaning of the messages based on the incoming language data.
b. Top-Down Processing
Top-down processing refers to how learners use their background knowledge to get the meaning of the message. Furthermore, according to Brown (2001), through top-down processing, listening is more concern with the activation of schemata, with deriving meaning, with global understanding, and with the interpretation of the text.
situation. Meanwhile, culture knowledge combines content and context also an understanding of the wider social setting which acts of listening take place.
In addition, Hughes (1991: 134) mentions two skills involved in listening as follows:
1. Macro skill
In macro skill, to understand what someone says, a listener has to involve with listening for specific information, obtaining gist from what is being heard or the listener should get the general idea of the information, following instructions or direction.
2. Micro skill
In micro skill, to understand what someone says, a listener has to interpret intonation pattern (e.g. recognize stress and rhythm), recognition of function and structures (interrogative of the request, imperatives e.g. sit down!), cohesive devices (e.g. such as, and, which), detect sentence constituents (e.g. subject, object, verb, preposition), recognizing discourse markers (e.g. well; oh, another thing is; now, finally.)
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of the combination of top-down and bottom-up processing is also called interactive processing (Peterson cited in Nunan (2003)).
2.2.3. Concept of Dictation
Dictation has been assumed as a valuable language learning device which is used for centuries. According to Davis and Rinvolucri (2002), dictation contains a wealth of new techniques to extend the traditional language-learning activity of dictation. In addition, Oller (1979: 39) asserts that dictation is a task which requires the processing of temporally constrained sequences of material in the language, divided up the stream of speech and then refers down what is heard requires understanding the meaning of the material.
Based on the Longman Dictionary of Language Teaching and Applied Linguistics (Richards, Platt, and Platt, 1992), dictation is a technique used in both language teaching and language testing in which a passage is read aloud to students, with pauses during which they must try to write down what they heard as accurately as possible. Basically, this is a technique used to know how much students’ ability to recognize and identify the spoken language. The students are expected to comprehend the contents of the passage and recognized all the words and sentences being read.
these aural codes into written symbols. It also can help students to diagnose and correct grammatical mistakes, it assures attentive listening and trains students to distinguish sounds, helps learning punctuation and develops aural comprehension. They are forced to pay a comprehensive attention to the passage dictated and write down what they perceive by sound, sight and feeling in the second language at the same time span allowed for a response in the first language. Once they get worse to concentrate on their listening, they will not able to guess quickly what they actually have to write then.
According to Yoshida in Takeuchi (1997), dictation can be a good teaching
device. His findings indicate that dictation is a good predictor of learners’
listening ability. In line with Yoshida’s finding, Takeuchi (1997) also indicates that dictation is confirmed to be an effective teaching technique. In addition, Ur (1991) recommends using dictation exercises as an activity for listening both for perception and comprehension.
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2.2.3.1. Types of Dictation
There are several types of dictation as a teaching technique. According to Oller (1979: 264), there are several types of dictation, as follows:
a. Standard dictation
This type of dictation is the best known. Students are required to write verbal sequences of material as spoken by a teacher or played back from a recording. The material should be presented at a normal conversational speed and is
given in sequences that are long enough to challenge students’ short term
memory.
b. Partial dictation
This type is also called spot dictation. This type is similar to the standard dictation, but the students are given either a written version of the text or the spoken one. The written version has certain portions which are deleted. The students must listen to the spoken material and fill in the missing word in the written version.
c. Dictation with competing noise
d. Dicto-Comp or dictation composition
This type of dictation, teacher reads the whole passage three times and the students are only given chance to write their work after the teacher has finished the third reading. They are asked to write the story as a reproduction of memory what they heard.
e. Elicited imitation
In this type of dictation, the students listen to the material, just as in standard dictation, but instead of writing down the material, the students are asked to repeat it or otherwise recount what was said.
f. Dictogloss
The term dictogloss refers to an innovation of standard dictation in which teacher reads a sentence once, after which students are to write briefly the key words and then to reconstruct the sentence in writing as accurately as they can.
g. Combined cloze and dictation
This type of dictation is alike in procedure to partial dictation, but the portions left out follow the deletion procedure of cloze.
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2.2.3.2. Materials and Procedures of Giving Dictation
In giving dictation, the teacher should consider the appropriate materials and procedures of dictation to students. Oller (1979: 39) confirms that, as an integrative test, dictation has to meet the naturalness requirements:
a. The sequences of words or phrases to be dictated are selected from normal prose, or dialogue, or some other natural form of discourse (or perhaps the sequences are carefully contrived to mirror normal discourse, as in well-written function).
b. The material is presented orally in sequences that are long enough to challenge the short-term memory of the learners.
Based on those naturalness requirements above, it is important for the teachers to make some preparation when they are going to give dictation test to their students. There are some requirements that must be followed, as follows:
a. Teachers have to select suitable materials to be dictated.
b. The words dictated should have been taught to the students before. c. The words dictated should be selected or chosen from simple words.
d. Teachers have to select suitable procedures which are appropriated in giving dictation test. There are two ways of giving dictation test; first is the teacher reads the words directly, and the second is the words dictated have been recorded before.
as reference and the teacher may use a tape recorder as an aid in presenting the test. For elementary students, teacher should choose the material which can be easily done by students.
Besides preparing the materials, teachers have to select suitable procedures which are appropriated in giving dictation test. The procedures of the presentation can be arranged in two ways; the teacher himself reads the material in front of the class or uses a tape recorder as an aid in presenting the test. The teacher is required to read the passage three times in all: first, at normal speed; then, with pauses between phrases or natural word groups so that the students may write down what they have just heard, and finally, at normal speed once more so they can check their work.
2.2.3.3. Advantages and Disadvantages of Dictation
Dictation has numerous benefits in teaching learning activity. Without doubt, dictation is one of a handy technique for teachers who need to exert a little crowd control. According to Davis and Rinvolucri (1995), dictation is an exercise which draws on the personal experience, attitudes and opinions of what both teachers and students. They further stated that dictation is an activity which is suitable for a wide range of levels and ages. They also list ten reasons for using dictation in the foreign language classroom, as follows:
1. The students are active during the exercise. 2. The students are active after the exercise.
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4. Dictation fosters unconscious thinking. 5. Dictation copes with mixed-ability groups. 6. Dictation deals with large groups.
7. Dictation will often calm groups.
8. Dictation is safe for the non-native speaker. 9. For English, it is a technically useful exercise. 10. Dictation gives access to interesting text.
Moreover, the advantages of dictation also mention by another expert. According to Montalvan (2006), there are some advantages of dictation. There are at least 20 advantages of dictation, and the most important to mention are:
1. Dictation can help develop all four language skills in an integrative way. 2. As students develop their aural comprehension of meaning also of the
relationship among segments of language, they are learning grammar.
3. Dictation helps to develop short-term memory. Students practice retaining meaningful phrases or whole sentences before writing them down.
4. Practice in careful listening to dictation will be useful later on in note taking exercises/activities, for instance, listening to lectures.
5. Dictation fosters unconscious thinking in the new language. 6. During and after the dictation, all the students are active. 7. Correction can be done by the students.
8. Dictation can be prepared for any level.
inexperienced teacher and can be prepared for any level. Besides the advantages above, there are also disadvantages of dictation, as follows:
1. While conducting dictation, it spends much time because the teacher has to prepare materials to be dictated and dictate it at least three times.
2. The sound of dictation should be clear and in normal speed so if the teacher do not use cassette or tape recorder, he/she should use their own voice.
3. Dictation are in fact written passages that are read out loud so they do not help students to understand the difference between the oral and the written language.
4. The materials are read at a slower pace than people speak normally and therefore it has little value to help students understand the language spoken.
2.2.4. Theoretical Assumption
As the gate of learning, listening skill becomes important for everyone. To reach success in learning process, the teacher should choose the appropriate technique so that the students can reach that goal. By using dictation, students are helped to develop their decoding skill. Lately, dictation has been assumed as an efficient technique for improving listening ability. Referring to the frame theory and explanation above, the researcher assumes that dictation is an effective technique
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2.2.5. Hypothesis
Based on the theoretical assumption above, the researcher hypothesized: “There is a significant improvement of the students’ listening ability after being taught
III. RESEARCH METHODS
This chapter presents research design, population and sample, data collecting techniques, research procedures, try-out, scoring system, procedures of collecting data, and hypothesis testing.
3.1. Research Design
In this research, the researcher used a quantitative research based on the experimental design. A quantitative research was used to measure how far the dictation technique influences the students in improving their listening ability. The researcher used one group pre-test and post-test design which took two classes as the experimental class and the try-out class.
Before administering the pre-test, the researcher firstly administered a try-out in the try-out class to measure the quality of the test which was used in taking the data. After that, the pre-test was administered to measure the students’ listening ability before the treatments. After the treatments were finished, the post-test was
administered to know the progress of students’ listening ability. The researcher used one class as the sample of the research where the researcher conducted the pre-test, the treatments, and the post-test to see whether there is better gain of
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In this research, the researcher was interested in investigating whether there is a
significant improvement of students’ listening ability after being taught through dictation technique. The design was presented as follows:
T1 X T2
Note:
T1 is the pre-test. X is the treatment. T2 is the post-test.
(Hatch and Farhady, 1982: 24)
3.2. Population and Sample
3.2.1. Population
The population of this research was the first year students of SMA Negeri 1 Tanjungbintang in academic year of 2012/2013. There are seven classes of the first year students. Each class consists of 34-38 students.
3.2.2. Sample
The researcher selected the sample by using random sampling technique through lottery drawing because the whole classes had the same rights to be chosen as the sample of the research. The researcher took two classes; the first was X-3 as the try-out class and the other was X-1 as the experimental class.
3.3. Data Collecting Techniques
3.3.1. Pre-test
The pre-test was administered to the experimental class before applying the
treatment. This test was done in order to know how far the students’ competence
in listening before the treatment. This test consisted of two parts; writing simple sentence and multiple choice with three options. The test was conducted within 60 minutes.
3.3.2. Post-test
The post-test was administered to the experimental class in the last program of this research after applying treatment. This test was done in order to know the
improvement of students’ listening ability. The test items were the same as in the
pre-test but in random order.
3.4. Research Procedures
The procedures of this research were as follows:
1. Determining the problems
In determining the problem, the researcher did pre-observation at SMA Negeri
1 Tanjungbintang to investigate the students’ problems of listening in the class.
2. Determining the population and sample
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another one as the try-out class (X-3). The researcher selected randomly in determining the experimental class and try-out class through lottery.
3. Finding and selecting the materials
This research applied the materials which were taken from the English
handbook based on the teaching and learning syllabus and the School Based Curriculum 2006 (KTSP).
4. Administering the try-out test
After designing the research instruments, the try-out test was carried out. The try-out was administered before giving the pre-test. It was expected to find out whether the test items used in the research were good or not. It refers to validity, reliability, level of difficulty, and discrimination power. This test consisted of two part; part one was writing simple sentence (listen, repeat, and write) and part two was multiple choice with three options (A, B, and C) and one of them was as the correct answer. The number of the test items is 50; 15 items for part one and 35 items for part two. The score of each correct answer was 2 points. Therefore, if one participant answered all the items correctly, she/he got 100 points. This test was administered for about 80 minutes.
power (see appendix 4), the researcher got that there were 3 bad items, 22 items were poor, and 25 items were satisfactory and good. Eventually, the items that were administered for both of the pre-test and post-test were 25 items.
5. Administering the pre-test
The pre-test was aimed for gaining the data of the students’ listening ability. The test was administered in the experimental class, class X-1. It was administered as the first test for all testiest before applying the treatment. The total of test items were 25 for 60 minutes. The score of each correct answer was 4 points. If one participant answered all the items correctly, she/he got 100 points.
6. Implementing the treatment using dictation technique
The treatment in the form of dictation technique was implemented in the experimental class. The dictation technique was given for three times. The time allocation was 2 x 40 minutes per meeting.
7. Administering the post-test
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8. Analyzing the test result
The data of the research (pre-test and post-test) were statistically analyzed by using SPSS 16.0. The researcher used Paired Samples T-test to analyze the data in order to find out whether dictation technique is able to improve the
students’ listening ability. The gain from the score of pre-test and post-test of the experimental class was then compared to see the difference.
9. Making the report about the findings.
3.5. Try-out
The try-out test was administered to gain appropriate instruments for this research. This test was administered in another class beyond the experimental class. There are four terms used to analyzed the try-out score. They are validity of the test, reliability of the test, level of difficulty, and discrimination power of the test. If the test has met the four criteria, it indicates that the test can be used as the base of arranging pre-test and post-test. These are some elements tested as follows:
3.5.1. Validity of the Test
To determine the validity of the test, the researcher only analyzed the test from content validity to measure whether the test has good validity or not. A test can be said valid if it measures the object to be measured and suitable for the criteria (Hatch and Farhady, 1982: 251).
Content Validity means that the test is a good reflection of the material that will be
been discussed. To get the content validity, the test is adopted from students’
handbook which is based on the curriculum. It means that the test has a good content validity since the test is a good representation of material studied in the classroom by the teacher.
Table 1. Specification of Micro Skill in Pre-test
No Objective Number of Items Percentage
1. Intonation pattern 2, 6, 9, 14, 18, 25 24%
Table 2. Specification of Micro Skill in Post-test
No Objective Number of Items Percentage
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items. To measure the coefficient of the reliability between odd and even group, the researcher used Spearman Brown Formula which was formulated below:
Note:
R : Coefficient of reliability between odd and even numbers N : Number of the students
In this research, the result of reliability of the try-out test was 0.84 (see appendix 3). It could be inferred that the test had very high level of reliability, in the range 0.80-1.00. It indicated that this instrument would produce consistent result when it was administered under similar condition, to the same participants, and in different time (Hatch and Farhady, 1882: 286). So, it can be concluded that the test was reliable.
3.5.3. Level of Difficulty
Note:
LD = Level of difficulty
R = The number of students who answer correctly N = The total number of students who take the test The criteria are: 7, 12, 15, 31, and 43). And, there were 30 satisfactory items. (see appendix 4)
3.5.4. Discrimination Power
Discrimination power is the proportion of the high group students getting the items correct minus the proportion of the low-level students who getting the items correct. To see the discrimination power, the researcher used the following formula:
Note:
D = Discrimination index
correct U = The number of upper group who answer correctly correct L = The number of lower group who answer correctly N = The total number of the students who take the test The criteria are:
0.00-0.20 = Poor items
0.21-0.40 = Satisfactory items 0.41-0.70 = Good items 0.71-1.00 = Excellent items
- (negative) = Bad items, should be ommited
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Based on the criteria above, there were 25 items in the try-out test which did not fulfill the standard of discrimination power, since those items had discrimination index under 0.20 which meant that the items had poor discrimination power. By looking discrimination power and level of difficulty, the total items that were administered were 25 items (1, 3, 4, 5, 8, 9, 11, 13, 17, 18, 21, 23, 26, 28, 29, 32, 34, 36, 39, 40, 44, 45, 46, 47, and 48). Those items had discrimination power more than 0.21 with the criteria satisfactory to excellent items. (see appendix 4)
3.6. Scoring System
In scoring the students’ test, the researcher used percentage correct by Lyman
(1971). The percentage correct score was used in getting the result of the students’
achievement test. The researcher calculated the pre-test and the post-test by using this formula:
Note:
X%c = Percentage of correct scores
R = Number of right answers
T = Total number of items on test
(Lyman, 1971: 95)
3.7. Procedures of Collecting Data
1. Scoring the pre-test and post-test.
2. Tabulating the result of the test and finding the mean of the pre-test and post-test by using this formula:
Note:
= Mean
ΣX = Total score of the students N = Number of students (Hatch and Farhady, 1982: 5)
3. Drawing conclusion by comparing the means of the pre-test and the post-test.
4. Analyzing the data used t-test. It was important to find out whether the data from experimental class were random and normally distributed or not.
Random Test
In this research, random test was used to know whether the data in the experimental class are random or not. The researcher used SPSS 16.0 for Windows with level of significant 0.05. The researcher used mean as cut point. The hypothesis was formulated as follows:
Ho : The data are random.
Hα : The data are not random.
The data are determined random if it gets the criterion; the Ho is accepted
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Normality Test
The researcher used normality test to measure whether the data were distributed normally or not. The hypothesis were formulated a follows: Ho : The data are distributed normally.
Hα : The data are not distributed normally.
The Ho is accepted if the result of normality test is higher than 0.05 (Sig.>α). In this case, the researcher used level of significant 0.05. The result of the normality test showed that the data were distributed normally. (see appendix 11)
3.8. Hypothesis Testing
Hypothesis testing was used to prove whether hypothesis that proposed by the researcher was accepted or not by using t-test. The researcher used SPSS (Statistical Package for Social Science) version 16.0. The researcher used Paired Samples T-test in order to know the significance of the treatments’ effect by
comparing the mean of pre-test and post-test. The hypothesis was analyzed at significant level of 0.05 in which the hypothesis was approved if sig.< α.
The criteria are:
Ho (null hypothesis) is accepted if t-ratio is lower than t-table (t-ratio<t-table). It
Hα (alternative hypothesis) is accepted if t-ratio is higher than t-table (t-ratio>t-table). It means that there is a significant improvement of students’ listening ability after being taught using dictation technique.
The hypothesis testing (see appendix 12) showed that t-ratio is higher than t-table (10.607>2.042). It meant that Ho was rejected and Hα was accepted. It can be
concluded that there is a significant improvement of students’ listening ability
V. CONCLUSIONS AND SUGGESTIONS
This chapter presents conclusions that are based on the research’s results and discussions in the previous chapter. It also presents some suggestions for English teachers and other researchers who want to try to apply dictation technique in the teaching of listening.
5.1. Conclusions
After conducting the research at the first year students of SMA Negeri 1 Tanjungbintang and analyzing the data, the researcher draws conclusion related to the results and discussion as follows:
There was a significant improvement of students’ listening ability after being
taught through dictation technique at SMA Negeri 1 Tanjungbintang. It can be seen from the total score of the pre-test and post-test which increased from 2068 to 2592. The increase was 524 points. The mean of students’ pre-test and post-test score increased from 57.44 up to 72.00 with gain score 14.56. Dictation technique also can increase listening sub-skills of micro skill. It was proved from the
7.41% for detect sentence constituents. It also can be seen from the result of the hypothesis testing which showed that the Sig. < α (p<0.05, p=0.000).
5.2. Suggestions
Regarding the conclusion stated previously, the researcher would like to propose several suggestions, as follows:
1. Since dictation technique can give better result in students’ listening ability, it is suggested to English teacher to apply this technique in teaching listening. The teacher as an important role in the class can develop it to deliver listening material to the students.
2. To implement dictation in teaching listening, the teacher should explain clearly to the students what listening sub-skills of micro skill are and how we can categorize that sub-skills. Before starting to teach the material, the teacher should give some examples of sub-skills of micro skill and let the students understand it for a few minutes. The teacher should explain the instructions well and make them simple and clear to minimalize students’ confusion. 3. While conducting dictation, the teacher needs to use own voice with good
spoken language proficiency. For those who have no good spoken language proficiency, dictation can be applied by using media such as tape recorder or cassette.
4. In this research, the researcher applied standard dictation. For further research, it is suggested to apply other type of dictation as mentioned in
