Bab I

CHAPTER I

INTRODUCTION

A. The Background of the Study
It is known that English is an International language which has been received by countries all over the world. The function of it is as a means of communication in meeting business or other activities among government over the world. Beside that English is used at science of knowledge, new invention in field of modern technology, pharmaceutical, medical, etc. As a developing country, Indonesia really needs English because Indonesia government is trying to improve all aspects which are usually faced by all countries.
One of these aspects is education, which is essential. As an English teacher to be the writer focuses her attention to the teaching English as the language of the world. In Indonesia, English is learnt and taught to junior high school, Senior high school even at university. English means that something important for the student to be taught at school based on situation and condition of the object area. But there are some problems that faced by the students. It is realized that most students get bad mark. So, it proves that English is really difficult for the students.
Speaking is the process of building and sharing meaning through the use of verbal and non-verbal symbols. Speaking is a crucial part of second language learning and teaching. However, today’s world requires that the goal of teaching speaking should improve students’ communicative skills because students can express themselves and learn how to use a language. Nowadays, many teachers agree that students should learn to speak the second language by interacting to others. For this case, students should master several speaking components’, such as: comprehension, pronunciation, grammar, vocabulary, and fluency.
In brief, English teacher should be creative in developing their teaching learning process to create good atmosphere, improve the students speaking skill, give attention to the speaking components’, and make the English lesson more exiting. For this reason, the English teacher should apply appropriate method and technique of teaching speaking. The method used by the teacher is discussion method. Discussion Method is one of the way to help students to get easy study and improving confidents to speak up. Language is primarily a tool of communication. Thus, learning a language means learning to perform communicative speech acts with it.
In general, speech acts are acts of communication. To communicate is to express a certain attitude, and the type of speech act being performed corresponds to the type of attitude being expressed. For example, a statement expresses a belief, a request expresses a desire, and an apology expresses regret. As an act of communication, a speech act succeeds if the audience identifies, in accordance with the speaker's intention, the attitude being expressed which realized in the language. Studying English without practice speaking is useless.
Through speaking, one can express their minds, ideas and thought freely and spontaneously. To most people, mastering the art of speaking is the single most important aspect of learning a second or foreign language, and success is measured in terms of the ability to carry out a conversation in the language. In psycholinguistic, speaking is a productive language skill. It is a mental process. Mental process also called as “a process of thinking”. We use word, phrases, and sentences to convey a message to a listener.
A word is the smallest free form (an item that may be uttered in isolation with semantic or pragmatic content) in a language, while a phrase is a syntactic structure that consists of more than one word but lacks the subject-predicate organization of a clause. When we combine these words into one group, then it becomes a sentence. Many students regard speaking achievement as the measure of knowing a language. These students define fluency as the ability to converse with others, much more than the ability to read, write, or comprehend oral language. They regard speaking as the most important skill they can acquire, and they assess their progress in terms of their accomplishments in spoken communication.
Generally, students need to recognize that speaking involves three areas of knowledge Mechanics (pronunciation, grammar, and vocabulary): Using the right words in the right order with the correct pronunciation. Functions (transaction and interaction): Knowing when clarity of message is essential (transaction/information exchange) and when precise understanding is not required (interaction/relationship building).Social and cultural rules and norms (turn-taking, rate of speech, length of pauses between speakers, relative roles of participants): Understanding how to take into account who is speaking to whom, in what circumstances, about what, and for what reason. Besides that, as we has been know that speaking is the process of building and sharing meaning through the use of verbal and non-verbal symbols. Speaking is a crucial part of second language learning and teaching.
However, today’s world requires that the goal of teaching speaking should improve students’ communicative skills because students can express themselves and learn how to use a language. Nowadays, many teachers agree that students should learn to speak the second language by interacting to others. For this case, students should master several speaking components’, such as: comprehension, pronunciation, grammar, vocabulary, and fluency. In brief, English teacher should be creative in developing their teaching learning process to create good atmosphere, improve the students speaking skill, give attention to the speaking components’, and make the English lesson more exiting.
Speaking as one of the basic language has an important role in communication. Clack and Clark states “In speaking, people put ideas into words and talk about perception they want other people to grasp”. Speaking is an interaction process between a speaker and a listener. In speaking, there is a process of communication, which convey the message from a speaker to a listener and he or she has to encode or interpret the message, which contains information. Nunan states that” communication is a collaborative achievement in which the speaker negotiates meaning in order to achieve the goals’.
It means that a speaker and a listener have to understand each other. In speaking, people begin with a conversation as a means of exchanging and sharing information with others. Byrne as quoted by Hughes argues about the main objective in teaching speaking, namely
“The main goal in teaching speaking skill is oral fluency. Oral fluency is defined as the ability to pronounce accurately and without too much hesitation. To attain this goal, you as the teacher must the students to more practice their speaking. The students have to imitate native speaker’s pronunciation and use language appropriately to convey their idea orally. ”

The educational curriculum (Kurikulum Satuan Pendidikan) for Senior High School students’ states that the basic competence in speaking field is interpret the meaning in transactional conversation (to get things done) by applying variety of spoken language in public speaking context such as debate and presentation. It can be concluded that Senior High School students are expected to have communicative namely speaking proficiently. Even through Senior High Scholl students have been studying English for many years since they were still Elementary School, but what is seen in reality is the opposite, most of them are unable to communicate in English fluently.
Moreover, according to the writer that there are five principle factors accounting for the reluctance of students to speak up in the class, namely:
1. Students’ perceived low proficiently in English: Although students did have the competence to respond to teachers’ question in English, their lack of confidence, unwillingness to take risks, and a perception that their English was poor resulted in a marked reluctance to respond
2. Students’ fear of mistakes and derision: Students were also afraid of making fools of themselves in front of their peers.
3. Teachers’ intolerance of silence: many of teacher taking part in the study gave the students little no wait time
4. Uneven allocation of turns: Teaches favored the better students when soliciting response. As the point out, this is probably related to the intolerance of silence. By targeting the better students’ teachers could be sure that there would not be periods of silence or confusing in their classrooms.
5. Incomprehensible input: The final factor identified by above the overly difficult teachers’ language input. One teacher, for instance, having viewed herself teaching reported that, “After viewing myself asking questions, I realized that what I thought were simple and clear questions were in fact quite difficult to understand. Not only this, but the questions were often confusing and specific enough”.
Besides, when the writer asked to the some teacher and some of them students on field, he found that almost at Senior High School and Junior High School students could not speak English fluently. Therefore, the English teachers not only have find out new learning strategies in teaching speaking, but also have to improve students’ speaking achievement. However, encouraging students to participate in speaking English is not an easy task. Teaching speaking nowadays faces many obstacles. One of the obstacles which make speaking difficult for students comes from the teaching method in teaching speaking.
In conventional way, the English teacher only asks the students to read a conversation text and to answer the questions related to it. The students do not practice the real speaking, they only read the conversation text and memorize conversation gambit without uttering it orally. The writer who likes to know more about the nature of speaking believes that the root of the cause in speaking problem is the lack of practice. The question is how sentences are pronounced, uttered orally and applied in conversation, discussion methods as a teaching strategy provides the answer. If the students are encouraged to practices their spoken language.
Discussion is an excellent activity for language learning because it engages students in a variety of cognitive and linguistic ways. In addition to providing meaningful listening, speaking and writing practice, discussion as teaching strategy is also highly effective in developing argumentation skills for persuasive speech and writing. The writer believes that discussion as teaching strategy is an important educational tool for learning analytic thinking skills and for forcing self-conscious reflection on the validity of one’s ideas. Discussion methods are effective in getting the trainees to think constructively while interacting with the rest of the group. Conduct discussions with large or small groups; however, small groups are more desirable. You can control and direct a small group more easily than you can larger groups of 10 or more trainees.
If a group is extremely large, break it into smaller groups or teams with a discussion leader for each team. The use of the terms class discussion and directed discussion in this text refer to a method in which you direct and control the verbal exchange of the class. Discussion, as a teaching strategy, provides the opportunity for learning in innovative, creative, and interesting ways for both the teacher and the students. It is divergences from the norm, which can help students learn more than what they usually, are capable of by drawing their interests. Like everything else, however, it has its advantages and disadvantages, as was just addressed.
However, if one comes to understand and properly manipulate the “power” of discussion, then the worlds of possibilities you can open up for your students are ones that can only work in their favor, exponentially increasing their success as individuals. By applying the discussion method it is expected that the students will improve their speaking achievement, have courage to speak up and enjoy expressing their argument about an issue. The goals can be achieved through the application of discussion method.
Based on the explanation above, it is concluded that the discussion as one of interactive teaching methods can trigger reluctant speakers (students to be active and confidents in speaking English about an issue. This research is conducted to investigate how the discussion method as a teaching strategy can significantly improve the students’ speaking achievement.

B. The Problem of the Study
In conducting research, the problem as it has been explained in the background the successful of speaking skill achievement is caused by many factors. They are Comprehension, Pronunciation, Grammar, Vocabulary and the last one is Fluency. One of the learning models which are to give contribution in making improvement in English, it can be talk is discussion method strategy. It is a learning concept than will help the teacher to forward the students to cooperate their knowledge with the application in their life.
In the other word, there are many effort which by the teacher to increase the English speaking, such as Cooperative Method, Repeating the Material, Making the Improvement Test and so on. Beside that, there are many too some reason or factors which are to be an effect of above case speaking. They are; most of them don’t practice English in real communication and situation, the teacher of English do not do the concepts of classroom technique of speaking or communicative language teaching very well yet, almost none of practice English outside the classroom, a lot of them are shy to use English in real communication and the teacher was not giving a well method on improving speaking English.
In the other words, still any problems in the speaking achievement. They are: First, the students feel ashamed and afraid to speak English, so they never practice and use target language and they always use mother tongue in the classroom. Second, for the teacher, they did not use variety of teaching such as visual aids. The teacher has to motivate the students to learn English in the class, and create the method of teaching. So the students will feel relaxed, and freely in using English in the classroom. The teacher must make afford to understand the material well. In learning English, The students are expected to reach four skills. Among those, speaking is the most difficult to master.
Teaching speaking can be done through dialogues, picture, games, discussion etc. The teacher should choose a suitable ways such as: using discussion method as a teaching strategy on improving students’ speaking achievement. If the teacher uses it, the students will have a lot of opportunity to practice pronunciation and communication or in other words it means that the students will get knowledge or input from discussion.

C. The Limitation of the Study
The researches realize that impossible will able to doing the research without a limitation. In the other words, the researcher is know that there are so many way effecting to improve speaking achievement, they are; discussion method, cooperative learning method, communicative language teaching method, direct method, audio-visual method think-pair share method, debate method, demonstrative method, etc. But this research, the researches deal with application of the discussion method as a teaching strategy on improving students speaking achievement.

D. The Formulation of the Study
In conducting a research, the problem of the study must be clearly stated to that formulation of the study and method used can be well determined. In line with the background and problem, the researcher is formulated in the form some question as follows:
1. How is discussion method as a teaching strategy in the class?
2. How is the student speaking achievement?
3. Is there any significant effect of using discussion method as a teaching strategy on improving speaking achievement at SMP Negeri 1 Sosorgadong in 2011/2012 Academic Year?

E. The Purpose of the Study
Based on the problem study above, the researcher is taking some of purpose of the study, they are:
1. To know how the discussion method in the class is
2. To know how the students speaking achievement is
3. To know if there is effect significant using discussion method as a teaching strategy on students speaking achievement