IMPROVING STUDENTS’ PRONOUNCING ABILITY
USING PHONICS
(
Kindergarten B Students’ of
TK Kalam Kudus Pontianak in Academic Year
2014/2015)
ARTICLE
Jurisdiction Responsibility
By:
Vivi Kurniati
F42108062
Approved by:
Supervisor I
Supervisor II
Drs. Bambang Wijaya
Drs. Luwandi Suhartono, M.Hum
NIP. 195011241979031005 NIP. 196211011990021001
Dean
of Teacher Training Education Faculty
Head of Language and Art Department
IMPROVING STUDENTS’
PRONOUNCING ABILITY USING PHONICS
Vivi Kurniati, Bambang Wijaya, Luwandi Suhartono
English Education Study Program, Teacher Training and Education Faculty Tanjungpura University, Pontianak
Email: vivi.kurniati@yahoo.com
Abstract
This research was conducted to solve the problems that were the students’ lack of reading in their first reading, and to find out whether the phonics technique can increase the student’s reading ability. The purposes of this research were: “To obtain how well phonics to improve students’ pronouncing ability” to the students of TK Kalam Kudus Pontianak. In this research, phonics is applied as one technique in order to increase young learner’s reading skill. Phonics is one strategy to help young children in pronouncing words or sentences to measure students’ pronouncing ability. It is used to help students represent sound or sounds. For the young learners, it works as a guideline when they start reading, because they can ready a word or sentences but pronounce its sound. The method of this research was Classroom Action Research. The research was conducted in three cycles. Each of cycle consists of four stages that is planning, action, observing, and reflecting stage. The subject of this research was 15 students who are the students of Kindergarten B TK Kalam Kudus Pontianak. The finding proves that phonics technique is effective to improve the students’ reading ability. The result of this research is the Kindergarten B students of TK Kalam Kudus Pontianak has shown their significant progress in improving reading by using phonics in each cycle: first cycle 1.4 point (very poor), second cycle 2.3 point (average) and third cycle 3.1 point (good). This means that phonics in one technique which is useful to improve students’ reading skill.
Keywords: Phonics, Young Learners, Pronouncing, Classroom Action Reseach
INTRODUCTION
Reading is one of the four important skills that are used in learning English. Reading is a complex cognitive process of decoding symbols for the intention of constructing or deriving meaning (reading comprehension). It is a means of language acquisition of communication, and of sharing information and ideas. In addition, it is a complex interaction between the text and the reader which is shaped by the reader’s prior knowledge, experiences, attitude, and language community which is culturally and socially situated. The reading process requires continuous practices, development, and refinement. Readers use a variety of reading strategies to assist with decoding (to translate symbols into sounds or visual
representations of speech) andcomprehension. Readers may use morpheme, semantics, syntax and context clues to identify the meaning of unknown words. Readers integrate the words they have read into their existing framework of knowledge or schema (schemata theory).
one of them. Phonics is the systematic teaching of the sound conveyed by letters and groups of letters, and includes teaching children to combine and blend these to read or write words. Phonics plays a key part in the process by making the representation of the sounds of words explicit, so that it can be controlled and applied deliberately to the task of reading and constructing words (Bald, 2007:39). We cannot read fluently until we read accurately, and this depends on accurate use of the information conveyed by letters. In reading, learners reconstruct the word by blending the sounds represented by the letters. Although letters often give us more than sounds, their links with sounds are their most consistent and important feature, and there is some link with sound in every word. Children and adults who can use this connection fluently and accurately build up a store of words that they can read very quickly. In addition, teaching phonics means that we also investigate students’ ability of pronouncing. Pronunciation involves far more than individual sounds. Pronunciation is a way of speaking a word, especially a way that is accepted or generally understood. It is also a graphic representation of the way a word is spoken, using phonetic symbols. In this term, researcher takes some points of scoring students’ pronunciation, such as voicing, vowel length and specific sound. When we read, we retrieve and put together information that has been set down using the alphabetic system, and when we write, we use it to represent, in order, the sounds that we would otherwise say. This is syntactic phonics or word building. Syntactic phonics enables readers to extract and use the information represented by letter, and with practice, to build up a store of words that are read so quickly that they seem to take almost no time to work out. Synthetic phonics in spelling is easily integrated with reading. Children can build words using plastic or magnetic letters as they learn to read them. This avoids them having to write each word by hand in the early stages, allowing all their attention to be focused on the sounds and letters so that they have maximum
opportunity to understand and reinforce the connections.
The researcher chooses this school as the object of research because Kalam Kudus School has a program in order to teach reading fluently for children.To read a word, children need to memorize how to read each word. For example to read “cat” children have to know, the word which contains of “c -a-t” are read by ”cat”. This is not effective because we can imagine how difficult to memorize all words that they have to learn. That is why, reading activity becomes difficult for kindergarten level. Phonics help children with a system to read. It helps children to have a key in pronouncing each alphabet. For comparing, learning phonics than memorizing each words, of course phonics more help students for reading. They just need to know the 44 phonemes in phonics, and blend it into the word. That is the basic to teach student in order to read the phrases or sentences.
Reading is one of ways to touch the world, and students will be proud by themselves in order to read independence and have experience by reading book, even a simple story book they have. As Freire and Marcado (cited in Goouch and Lambirth, 2007:79) said, reading the word so that you can later read it are preceded by learning how to write the world, that is, having the experience of changing the world and touching the word. One of the ways to teach children how to read a text, we should teach them how to pronounce each word rightly. It will help student get reading fluently as well as pronounce the word rightly. That is why the researcher is concerned with this case as the basic of reading pronunciation. Therefore, a good and interesting technique to teach reading is a necessity.
Phonics help the learner to recognize “c /khe/ their interest, sustain motivation, and reinforce learning in imaginative and exiting ways. The researcher believes that for those reasons, this method is giving a good impact for young learner’s first reading. In reference to the research background and considering the topic, researcher puts forward this following problem of this research: “Improving Students’ Pronouncing Ability Using Phonics”
How does reading through phonics help students pronounce a sentence well?
The purpose of this research is: This research aims at investigating whether using phonics as a method in the classroom can help kindergarten students of Kalam Kudus Christian School Pontianak in the academic year 2014/2015 to pronounce a sentence rightly. Based on the problem that the teacher in this case the writer of this research has explained in the research background, the significance of this action research will be the use of “Phonics” as a method of teaching will improve the students’ ability in pronouncing sentence to the kindergarten students of Kalam Kudus Christian School Pontianak.
In order to avoid misunderstanding of terms which exist in this research, it is necessary to explain them as follows
a) Reading in this research refers to the ability to pronounce rightly what the students read in the simple sentence (arrange for kindergarten students level, for example: The tent is up).
b) Phonics is a method to teach reading, in this term the writer just uses simple phonics to teach young children, it contains the sound from letter a—z and, for addition, some blend sound, example: br, tr, fr.
c) Classroom Action Research is classroom-based research which is applied to find the best solution to the problem faced by teacher
in the classroom, in order to improve teaching learning process.
d) TK Kalam Kudus is a bilingual school that is located at Jalan Purnama no. 52, here the students are taught by i-learning approach (phonics is one of the method in teaching nursery and kindergarten students becomes world-wide phenomenon. Teaching English for young learners has its rules. One of them is the language or vocabularies must be appropriate with their age and enjoyable for them. Young learner learns very quickly and they have so much fun with learning (Donaldson, 1987 cited in Scott, et.al). Children move through a number of stages when learning English as a new language. Some go through these stages more quickly than others, and children will sometimes have the characteristics of more than one stage at the same time as their transition between stages. Understanding a child’s stage of learning is important for planning appropriate activities.
Children gradually move from memorized sentences to original, productive and spontaneous English conversation. When young children learning English can engage in conversational English, this does not mean that they have mastered the English language. In fact, their English often has errors in pronunciation, vocabulary and grammar, and these errors may last a long time. In conclusion, we need to have a lot of interaction with the young learner in English to maintenance their English. In the first understanding how their students think and operate. They need to be able to pick up current interests so that they can use them to motivate them. something in order to know or to understand the instruction given and to guide the knowledge. Gade cited in Brown (1980:8) defines teaching as any activity which is decided to facilitate learning, include the setting of condition for learning and to make the learner able to learn.
Brown (1980: 9) in his book stated that teaching is a process in which learner, teacher, curriculum and other variables are organized in a systematic way to attain some determined goals. It can be simulation, direction, guidance and encouragement of learning. Correspondingly, he claimed that teaching is showing or helping someone to learn how to do something, giving instruction, guiding in the study of something, providing with knowledge, causing to know or
understand. Teaching and learning process are acquiring or getting of knowledge of a subject or a skill by study experience or instructions.
Teaching is the activities that teachers decide, create, show in a certain way to enable students understand the instruction so that they are able to learn. The teacher’s role is to help the students, show them how to master the lesson and give tricks in order to make the students easy to receive the lesson. The teaching process should be useful and effective to teach student about type of knowledge. Effective teaching means teacher is able to select and implement a teaching strategy that is appropriate to the curriculum goal and the information processing capabilities of student’s level. It means curriculum cannot be separated from a material in the process of teaching and learning.
A student's first language often interferes with English pronunciation. For example, /p/ is aspirated in English but not in Indonesian language, so when a Indonesian speaker pronounces 'pig' without a puff of air on the /p/, a foreign speaker may hear 'big' instead. Sometimes the students will be able to identify specific problem sounds and sometimes they won't. You can ask them for suggestions, but you will also need to observe them over time and make note of problem sounds. Another challenge resulting from differences in the first language is the inability to hear certain English sounds that the native language does not contain. Often these are vowels, as in 'ship' and 'sheep,' which many learners cannot distinguish. Descriptions of the sound and mouth position can help students increase their awareness of subtle sound differences.
METHODOLOGY
Action Research. According to Kemmis and McTaggaert, 1988:5 cited in Louis Cohen, Lawrence Manion and Keithh Morrison (2000:227) action research is: “A form of collective self-reflective inquiry undertaken by participants in social situations in order to improve the rationally and justice of their own social and educational practices, as well as their understanding of these practices are carried out.” The other expert, Stephen Corey said that Classroom Action Research is the process by which practitioners attempt to study their problems scientifically in order to guide, correct, and evaluate their decisions and actions.
Stenhouse, cited in Cohen, Manion and Marison (2006:227) states that the main focus of action research in classroom and school is to encourage teachers to become involved in their own practices, and view themselves as researchers. Kemmis and McTaggart (1992:10) cited in Louis Cohen,et.al,(2000:227) argue that “to do action research is to plan, act, observe and reflect more carefully, more systematically, and more rigorously than one usually does in everyday life”. Classroom Action Research has four stages that should be done as the procedures, as Lewin (1946:1984) cited in Cohen,et.al,(2006-234) codified the Classroom Action Research process into four stages: planning , acting, observing and reflecting. The process of an action research based on Zuber-Sterrit (1996) cited in Cohen,et.al, (2006:232) is as follows:
Schema of Classroom Action Research
The cycle form:
Planning
Reflecting Acting
Observing
Planning : For doing the research
Action : Application/the action of plan in the real treatment
Observing : To see how the process of listening comprehension using video.
Reflecting : Study what we will have done and reflect it for the students’ learning.
The Classroom Action Research is usually conducted in certain cycles and the procedure of this research can be seen from the activities of each cycle as the following.
1) Planning
The writer plans the teaching learning activity to over come the problem found in the previous teaching learning process, which is the lack of student’s skill in pronouncing the phonics. The plans include the preparation before the teaching learning activity such as lesson plan, plastic letters and some objects to be learned, booklet, and supporting media such as Laptop, LCD, and slide of phonic letters or words.
2) Acting
To act the planning, the writer as a teacher teaches the lesson that has already been prepared and will conduct the research in the classroom where the problem was found. The teacher drilled the students using media to show them some letters and sound it out by phonics, after that the word which consists of 3-6 letters to teach them spell it in phonics, then, pronounce it well. To make some variation, teacher can use plastic letter with interesting object to teach. Then if they can read word fluently, the teacher is able to add some more words to become phrases or simple sentence (example: ‘the fat rat’, ‘a big pan’, ‘a crack on the egg’, etc).
3) Observing
In this matter, teacher will identify some error found in students’ pronunciation and will tell them more specifically. The teacher made some notes and kept it to know and predict how far the students master the phonics.
4) Reflecting
Based on the note taken and the data has been collected by measuring students’ performance, the writer will get some important feedback. The feedback is very important in re-planning the next action. It changes a certain action or add some more actions in order to improve the teaching learning process. The participant that is observed by researcher is kindergarten students of Kalam Kudus Christian School Pontianak. The researcher will take a class in Kindergarten of Kalam Kudus School in academic year 2013/2014 to be the participants of this research. The number of students is 15 students in a class that researcher takes.
The technique that is used to collect data is observation and measurement technique. The observation consists of observation checklist and researcher’s field note. Observation checklist is used to observe the students and teacher act in practicing the reciprocal of teaching technique in the form of checklist table. Field note is a note, which is made to record the important events that happen throughout the teaching learning process when the treatment is applied to support the data from observation sheet. The measurement consists of scoring rubric in each lesson plan.
The instrument that is used to collect data is a test that consists of phonics booklet. After the students are given the treatment, the researcher gives the booklet as the instrument for measure students’ pronouncing ability and reading simple sentence booklet.
RESULT AND DISCUSSION
Result
To know whether phonics can improve the students’ reading pronunciation, the writer will conduct an observation from the three meetings and the result of three meetings will be compared. When the average frequency of students’ pronunciation of the second meeting is higher that the first meeting and the third meeting is higher that the second meeting, it can be concluded that teaching pronouncing using phonics is able to improve students’ ability in pronouncing. There are several techniques used by the researcher to analyze the data. In this research the researcher uses the following data analysis.
Table of Qualification
Test Score Qualification Good to Excellent Average to Good Poor to Average Poor
Analysis on the students’ mean score
………(1)
Note:
M = The mean or average score of students actions
= The sum of score of students’ actions = The number of the students being observed
(Adapted from Chitraelu,1993:315 in Lim, Elissa 2008:40)
N = Total students
T = Total student
Percentage of Total Percentage Score =
easier when they have mastered to sound out each phonic. The students firstly pronounce words, which contains of three words. For their ability in pronouncing through phonics. Instance, a red rod, ten nuts, etc. The students almost mastered to pronounce the phrases well. However to link each word still become a problem. That is why, the teacher ask them to read it more than once until they understand what linking word is.
Furthermore, in the last meeting, the students showed a significant progress of the students’ pronunciation performance. It indicated a significant sign of the students pronouncing ability increased. mention each phonic (for example: jump; j – u – m- p – jump). If the students really stuck
and can not continue their pronouncing, teacher helps them to pronounce it then ask them to pronounce it again.
In using phonics technique, the teacher should begin the pronouncing process by introducing the phonics, practice how to sound out the phonics, how to sound out the blend sound phonics, voice and voiceless sound, fluency or linking the word and how to distinguish similar sounds (specific sounds). While the students are in progress of the technique, the teacher should be the partner or facilitator in learning process in order to guide and motivate the students to improve their pronunciation.
REFERENCES
Bald, J. (2007). Using Phonics to Teach Reading and Spelling. London: Paul Chapman Publishing.
Brown, D. H. (2001). Teaching by Principle: An Interactive Approach to Language Pedagogy. New York: Pearson Education Limited.
Cohen, L., Manion, L. & Morrison, K. (2000). Research Method in Education. Taylor & Francis e-Library
Edge, N. (2001). ABC Phonics: Sing, Sign, and Read!Teacher’s Guide. 6-37
Johnston, R., & Watson, J. (2007). Teaching Synthetic Phonics. Glasgow: Learning Matters Ltd.
Lefever, S. (2007). English For Very Young Learner. Malfridur, 27-31
Mulla, K. A. (2010). Developing Young Learners’ Reading Skill in an EFL Classroom. EFL Reading Skill, 89-98. Norton, L. S. (2009). Action Research in
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