STICK PUPPETS AS AN ALTERNATIVE MEDIA TO IMPROVE THE SEVENTH GRADERS’ SPEAKING SKILL OF A JUNIOR HIGH SCHOOL IN BANTARAN

Abstract

The importance of speaking has been the main focus on teaching English as a foreign language.  The significance of speaking ability can be seen from students’ speaking ability. After conducting preliminary study, it is undeniable that many students have difficulty improving their speaking skills. The problems were devided into five speaking issues; students’ linguistic aspects, psychological aspects, the teacher’s strategy and method in teaching speaking, the lack of media, and students’ speaking achievement. Thus, the researcher proposed stick puppet as an alternative media  because it is suitable with the strategy and the aspects that were being improved. This research was Classroom Action Research (CAR) which aims to improve students’ speaking skills. The participants of this research were the Seventh-grade A students’ of SMPN 1 Bantaran in the academic year 2021/2022. The research design applied in this study was a collaborative classroom action research consisting of 1 cycle covering 3 meetings and 1 post-test. The data collection techniques used a speaking test as the primary data to collect students’ speaking scores and teacher’s field note, teacher’s interview, students’ questionnaire, and classroom observation sheet as the secondary data. After implementing stick puppets media, this research found that the speaking skill of seventh-grade A students of SMPN 1 Bantaran improved through stick puppets. The result showed that 22 students or 95,65% could pass the KKM with a mean score improved 90,86 compared to the preliminary speaking test was 16,08. After the research, the data presented that stick puppets media can improve students speaking skills in vocabulary, pronunciation, grammar, and content. Additionally, stick puppets can increase students’ activeness in the classroom. On the other hand, the students were interested, motivated, and confident in using stick puppets which helped students to describe people’s physical appearance.