Lecturer of Teacher Training and Education Faculty of Sultan Ageng Tirtayasa University
D. DISCUSSION
D.2 Students’ Response toward the implementation of Speaking with Content Program
students actively express their thought orally in English. The following statements from students strengthen this issue.
I’m afraid of making mistakes when I am asked to speak in English.
I think my pronunciation is not good and I’m afraid my friends will not understand when I am saying something in English (Wan, pseudonym).
I don’t know, I am nervous when I speak English especially when it is in front of my friends. I forget everything to say when I am speaking in front of my friends (Rahmat, pseudonym).
The two statements above indicate two psychological matters faced by the students. Nervousness and lack of confidence, as reported in many other studies (see Juhana, 2011, among others) reduce students’ participation in the classroom in speaking English. As a result, their exposure to the speaking practice is lack causing their slow improvement in terms of speaking English.
All in all, both linguistic and psychological factors causing students’ slow improvement call for a teaching approach that is concerned with building both aspects to support students’ improvement in speaking English. The following section discusses findings related to students’ responses toward the implementation of speaking with content program.
D.2 Students’ Response toward the implementation of Speaking
142 Kumpulan Gagasan: PENDIDIKAN MENJADI PRIORITAS preparing before reading and detailed reading that prepare them to build solid knowledge about a certain topic they are required to fulfill the speaking task they had to perform. This is to follow what Rose and Acevedo (2006a, p.36) advice which emphasized adequate preparation to perform each task successfully, before students are asked to do it. According to them, once they have successfully performed the task they are then cognitively prepared for the following step that elaborates their understanding of the activity they have completed. This confirms what one of the students’ statement, as in, “ when I read and discuss first with my friends in a group a topic I have to deliver in front of class, I feel more confident” (Leo, pseudonym). These suggest that preparation stage as provided in the teaching program assists students in building their speaking skill in English due to their better preparation to speak in English.
Moreover, some students express their positive response toward the teaching program in terms of scaffolding or assistance given by both teacher and peers. They said that it is helpful when the teacher provided them some important expressions to be used in their speaking performance, “the expressions given by the teacher helped me much and I felt more prepared to perform”. In addition, assistance from peers especially through discussion also enriches their knowledge both in terms of language knowledge (vocabularies and expressions) and topic understanding (content) as in, “ through the discussion with my friends, I know more about vocabularies from the texts we read and also understand more about the content because we share together”. The statement given by the student proves that scaffolding, even for tertiary students, is urgent in that it provides more opportunities for students and teacher to share more about not only the language knowledge but also various topics the texts shared. As it is mentioned, the speaking with content program is an intensive approach to scaffolding student speaking skill using high quality, age appropriate texts. It redesigns classroom teaching patterns to enable success for all learners. In other
words, scaffolding is worth doing, in this context, as a form of support for the students’ speaking improvement. In addition, this situation also urges for the
“explicit teaching” (Christie, 1990), “direct telling” (Callaghan & Rothery, 1989) on important expressions, vocabularies and pronunciation, for example, to be conducted.
Other response is related to critical thinking improvement. According the students, reading activities emphasized in the teaching program, helped them train as well as improve their critical thinking, “I think the reading activities and discussion toward the readings helps me to improve my critical thinking, too”. Through this, they learned to analyse meanings/messages in the text and think critically about those meanings and messages. They also learned to synthesise as they confirmed what they read from the texts given by the teacher with what they previously have understood about the topic.
As mentioned in the theoretical framework above, Like Reading to Learn, the speaking with content program provides teacher a set of skills to accelerate learning and to close the ‘ability’ gap in their classrooms one of which is set of skills for interacting with students around written texts that supports all students in a class to read high level texts with critical comprehension, and to use what they have learned from their reading to speak. This situation likely triggers the students better understand their readings. For example, prior to a debating performance on the abortion issue, students were asked to find out relevant articles mainly a discussion text types and read together in their group to study those articles together e.g., find out important issues shared in the texts. They further outlined positive and negative sides of the abortion issues as they found the texts and carried out further discussion about the issue in the group. This way of preparing students to debate upon the issue implemented in this research also support students to work cooperatively and develop their critical thinking through the discussion they conducted. As the data from the observation revealed, most students were active learning to share their opinion and to argue each other before they
144 Kumpulan Gagasan: PENDIDIKAN MENJADI PRIORITAS conducted a debating performance which also directly benefits to their speaking improvement.
Furthermore, one student argued that the strategy implemented in the teaching program encouraged him to actively participate during the class. As mentioned above, in a discussion session, for example, it is a must for her to share so that she prepared for the discussion as can be seen in the following statement.
I love the reading strategy applied in this teaching program. You know, I must share what I have read in the group sharing session and I think I have to share my understanding about the topic from the text or I also sometimes just share vocabularies which I think new for many of us in the group (Risa, pseudonym).
The general conclusion derived from the statement above is that this teaching strategy, to some degree, enables students to rapidly learn to read, write and speak at the same time. Students, as exemplified in Risa’s statement above, develop language understandings well beyond their independent competence as proven by her ability to share what she has learned from the text both about the language and the topic shared in the text (Culican 2005, 2006) which surely impacts to their speaking skill. All these show that appropriate reading strategy to prepare students to speak more and speak better in English is highly required and therefore need further consideration.
In summary, the illustrated facts above indicate that reading activities used to prepare students to speak in English, scaffolding both from teacher and peers designed in the teaching program called Speaking with Content assist students in preparing themselves to speak in English. As it is mentioned above, the program does not only allow students to practice their speaking more but also, at the same time, learn to improve their critical thinking. It is therefore suggested that this teaching program be applied in other EFL contexts.