191 MUHADARAH AS MEDIA FOR INCREASING STUDENTS’
SPEAKING SKILL OF 3rd SEMESTER OF ISLAMIC COLLEGE OF RASYIDIYAH KHALIDIYAH AMUNTAI
Siti Anida Maghfira
Abstract:
The fact that english as the foreign language which much have difference compare with mother language is the other problem they faced. Having listing the problems found that based on the lecturers’ observation to the students of 3rd semester of Islamic College of Rasyidiyah Khalidiyah Amuntai since it includes many things, there are; lack of vocabularies, the poorness of arranging utterances, lack of idea to speak, and afraid to speak. After facing those problems, the researcher tries to implement muhadarah as the one way for making better students’ speaking skill. This research uses quasi experimental research design to investigate the effect of muhadarah in increasing students speaking skill. There are 2 classes of third semester students’ of English Department at STAI Rasyidiyah Khalidiyah as samples of this study. One class was control group while another one was an experimental group.
The data collection involved number of instruments, they are, oral test to measure students speaking achievement, and documentary to know the number of students. Pretest and posttest gave to the students to know the distinctions of their speaking skill before and after treatment.
Keywords:
Muhadarah, Speaking Skill
Siti Anida Maghfira is a STAI Rakha (Rasyidiyah Khalidiyah) lecturer, email: annidasiti89@gmail.com
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A. Background
Many students claim speaking skill as the difficult one. It happens because speaking is part of produce skill which require students to produce words by oral as the final result.As Lindsay and Knight (2005) said that ‘speaking is a productive skill.’The fact that english as the foreign language which much have difference with mother language is the other problem they faced. Whereas, speaking is the central one students to establish the successful communication.
Concerning with speaking ability, Clark and Clark (1994) define speaking as fundamentally an instrument act. Someone talks in order to have some effect on their listener. Levelt (1989) as quoted by Bygate (2001) in Carter and Nunan (1991) proposes that speech production involves four major process. They are firstly is conceptualization, secondly is formulation, third is articulation, and four is self monitoring.
In line with them, Hornby (1995) argues by using speaking, students will be helped for making everyday interaction based on their ability to speak fluently. Meanwhile, speaking has essential rules in teaching English. As Richards (2008) states:
The mastery of speaking skills in English is a priority for many second-language or foreign-language learners. Consequently, learners often evaluate their success in language learning as well as the effectiness of their English course on the basis of how much they feel they have improved in their spoken language profiency.
The opinion above tells that speaking determines learners success in mastery their second/foreign language.
Brown (2007) argues that speaking is an interactive process of constructing meaning that involves producing and receiving and processing information. It means speaking is the tools for transfering meaning to other people by arrange words into good sentence in order other people will understand what speaker means.
Meanwhile, Hurlock (1998) says that ‛speaking is language form that used articulation or sentences for delivered mean of the idea‛.
He defines that speaking is the important one to communication for
193 giving information or thought.
Based on theories above, it can be concluded that speaking is an essential part in human being life. Speaking is how to someone transfer what they think or opinion, information, and idea to other. Someone is not only transferring or giving or producing information, but also processing information in that activity.
According to Brown (2004), there are five types of speaking performance. The first is imitative. In this category just like a parrot which always imitate what the human’s says. It simply a word or phrase or short sentence the copied it from first speaker. The second, is intensive. Here, the point is the production of stretches of oral language designed to demonstrate competence in a narrow band of a grammatical, phrasal, lexical, or phonological relationship.
The next type is responsive, in this type about speaking include interaction and communication like short comprehension, but in limited level. for example, very short conversation, standard greetings and small talk, simple requests and comments and the like.
This category named as interactive. The interactive is the transactional language which has the purpose of exchanging spesific information or interpersonal exchange which have the purpose of maintaining social relationship.
The last type is extensive. Here, this category produce speeches, oral presentations and story-telling, during which the opportunity for oral interaction from listeners is either highly limited.
In teaching English, speaking cannot be apart out into other skill.
Those are fitted out between one skill to other. In teaching speaking, teacher may emphasize speaking in a particular activity, but at the same time he/she will also require students to listen, even to read and write.
This complement process of the four skills is added the richness and complication of meaningful communication (Lindsay & Knight, 2005).
The focus in teaching speaking is to improve oral language for communication. But, in fact, teaching speaking in the classroom often unsuccess in its process. Many students are passive during the activity
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although the aim of teaching speaking for maximize the use of language by students.
Teaching speaking is to teach learner to produce, use and arrenge word, and organize them in good sentences. Teacher teaches learners to produce speech sound, use word and sentence stress, intonation of the second/foreign language.Besides, teacher guides learners in selecting appropriate words and sentences according to the proper social setting, situation and subject matter. Teacher helps students to organize their thoughts in a meaningful and logical sequence, use language as a means of expressing values and judgments and use the language quickly and confidently with few unnatural pauses (Kayi, 2006).
The students’ respond in teaching learning process will reflects the success of teaching speaking. Based on Ur (2000) there are some characteristics of a successful teaching speaking activity:
a. Learners talk a lot. As much as possible of the period of time allotted to the activity is in fact occupied by learner talk.
b. Participation is even. Classroom discussion is not dominated by a minority of talkative participants; all get a chance to speak, and contributions are fairly evenly distributed.
c. Motivation is high. Learners are eager to speak: because they are interested in the topic and have something to say about it, or because they want to contribute to achieving a task objective.
d. Language is of an acceptable level. Learners express themselves in utterances that are relevant, easily comprehensible to each other, and of an acceptable level of language relevancy.
Furthermore, successful in teaching speaking will make students not only about saying something, or practice their language as interaction, but also about how the students feel convey and motivated in speaking. That is the real learning goal in teaching speaking.
Having listing the problems found that based on the lecturers’
observation to the students of 3rd semester of Islamic College of Rasyidiyah Khalidiyah Amuntai since it includes many things, there are;
195 lack of vocabularies, the poorness of arranging utterances, lack of idea to speak, and afraid to speak.After facing those problems, the researcher tries to implement muhadarah as the one way for making better students’ speaking skill. Muhadarah is the one of the media which considered as the suitable media for increasing their speaking skill. It quite same with speech or discussion method. Muhadarah is the familiar activity of students who take boarding school as their school. Fact that Islamic College of Rasyidiyah Khalidiyah Amuntai is in boarding school foundation, made researcher chose muhadarah as the way to increase students’ speaking skill.
Through muhadarah, students are practiced to speak in front of audiences, train students’ braveness to speak in public, making good conversation and good sentences with audiences by using interesting words. Besides, muhadarah as the place to improve their knowledge.
There are some researchers conducted research related how to improve students speaking ability. First, Muflikhah (2013), She explains that speaking can be improved by using discussion method.
Furthermore, Permana (2015) concludes through that team pair solo technique can make students’ speaking skill ability increase. Chou (2004) also argues that speaking skill increase by using socioaffective strategies.
After reading the previous study above related speaking ability, the researcher make conclusion that almost researcher face same problems in which students who use English as the second language have problem in speaking ability. There are variety oftechnique used by the previous researchers to improve students’ speaking skill in order to solve that problem. Interest, skill and students’ motivaton are observed to get clear information which one is the wrong matter. One of the interesting thing is students’ motivation in English learning. Students who have high motivation is indicated they will get higher achievement. Hence, in this research, the researcher tries a different technique how to improve students’ speaking skillused muhadarah as the media for increasing their speaking skill. This research attempts to investigate the effect of muhadarah as the media to increase students’ speaking skill.
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B. Research method
Since this research is concerning with quasi-experimental research investigating muhadarah as the media for increasing students speaking skill, so, the researcher apply quantitative research. As Latief (2013:93) said that ‚experimental research measures the effect of one manipulated and controlled (independent) variable to another (dependent) variable‛. Meanwhile, Ary, et.al (2010:265) said that experimental research a scientific investigation in which the researcher manipulates one or more independent variables, controls any other relevant variables, and observes the effect of the manipulations on the dependent variable(s). It aims to study the independent variable, muhadarah and observes the effect on the dependent variable, speaking skill. Here, there are two groups, experimental group and control group.
Here, researcher does not select randomly for an ideal group for experiment. Furthermore, both of the student group are determined as experiment group (X1) and control group (X2). This study used quasi- experimental pretest-posttest design to identify the treatment. Quasi experimental research occurs when it is not possible for researcher to randomly assign subject to group because the school system wanted the researcher to decide to which classrooms students were assigned. So, the researcher wants to see what would happen to the students’ speaking scores or students’ achievement when they join and follow muhadarah activity.In choosing the samples for the experiment group and the control group, the researcher used a coin to choose which class became the experimental and control group after she knew the result of pretest.
In the teaching learning process, the materials for both groups are the same. In the experimental group, the students join muhadarah activity, while in the control group, the students do not follow this activity. The test gave before and after the treatment, both groups got a pretest and posttest to measure the improvement of the students’ writing skill. The pretest gave for both groups in order to analyze whether both groups were at the same level.Pretest held at the first meeting and post test held at the last meeting of teaching learning process.
197 During the experiment of this study, the first two sessions, the lecturer handled both experiment and control group. Then during the second two session, researcher handled the both experiment and control group. The swapping procedure is carried out in order to avoid or at least to minimize the bias affected because both researcher and english lecturer have different experience of teaching.
In terms of validity and the reliability of the test, the researcher held try out to prove test validity and reliability beforethe students got the real.
The statistic analysis is computerized using the SPSS 20 for window’s program. The hypotheses testing are conducted to see Ho is accepted or rejected.
C. Result
Pretest has important role to make both experimental and control group are equivalence. The equivalence of group is the main factor in conducting experimental research before treatment. In this pretest, the researcher used t-test. In analyzing the pretest score data, the researcher first made the table summary of computation, then she used the formula of independent t-test. The researcher used one tailed at 1% significant level.
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Table 2. Coefficient Value of ‚t-value‛ for pretest
Df (32) Computed t-value Critical t-value
Significant Level
(1%) ,980 2.423
After calculated the data, found that the critical t value (2.423) is greater than computed t value (0.980). It means that the result is not significant. So, the researcher concluded that both experiment group and control group have the same capability or in the other word both of group are homogeneous. It means that the two groups are comparable and similar in their achievement.
The posttest was administered to know the effect of the treatment after the research was completed.The researcher used one tailed at 1%
Table 1. Independent Samples Test (pretest)
Levene's Test for Equality of
Variances
t-test for Equality of Means
F Sig. t df Sig. (2-
tailed) Mean
Difference Std.
Error Difference
95%
Confidence Interval of
the Difference
Lower Upper
Scores _in_
NE
Equal variances
assumed ,022 ,884 ,980 32 ,334 1,765 1,800 -1,903 5, 432 Equal
variances not assumed
,980 31,752 ,334 1,765 1,800 -1,903 5,433
199 significant level, the result showed that computed t value 4,032 is greater than critical t value is 2.423.
Table 3. Coefficient Value of ‚t-value‛ for posttest
Df (32) Computed t-value Critical t-value
Significant Level
(1%) 4,032 2.423
Table 4. Independent sample t test
Levene's Test for Equality
of Variances t-test for Equality of Means
F Sig. t df Sig. (2-
tailed) Mean Differen
ce Std. Error Difference
95% Confidence Interval of the
Difference Lower Upper Equal
variances assumed
,031 ,861 4,032 32 ,000 7, 882 1,955 3,900 11, 865
Equal variances not assumed
4,032 31,995 ,000 7, 882 1,955 3,900 11, 865
To check whether Ha is accepted in this research, the researcher compared the computed t value and critical t value. Critical t value is 2.423, while computed t value is 4.032. The computed t value is higher than critical t value, so it can be concluded that there is significant different between students who followed muhadarah activity thanstudents who do not followed muhadarah activity. In conclusion, from the result above, it can be concluded that Ha is accepted.Based on the result of the data analysis in this research, the writer described the result finding based on hypothesis testing. The hypothesis testing showed that there is significant difference between students who
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followed muhadarah activity thanstudents who do not followed muhadarah activity. The students who followed muhadarah activity gain better scores than the students who do not followed muhadarah activity.
This is evidenced by the result of computed t value is bigger than critical t value in 1%. So, it was clear that muhadarah activity gave positive effect on the students speaking ability.
D. Discussion
After the result of students’ speaking achievement scores had been analyzed, the result shows that the students who followed muhadarah activity thanstudents who do not followed muhadarah activity. It can be seen from the students’ speaking achievement which shows that the experimental students’ mean score higher than the control students’
mean score (76. 59 > 68. 71). Besides, the result of the data analysis using independent t-test shows that t-test (4. 032) is higher than critical t value ( 2. 432).
From the discussion above, this research result shows that muhadarah as the media for increasing speaking ability gave positive effect towards students speaking ability better than non muhadarah activity.
E.Conclusion
The muhadarah activity is an effective media for increasing students speaking ability. The use of this media helps students to speak more confident. Since this activity is simple, fun, and arousing students’
creativity in making their idea and thought to be interesting oral words, students are getting more active and more encouraged to speak and improved their speaking. As a result, the students’ speaking ability is improved optimally.
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