THE EFFECTS OF INFORMATION GAP TASK IN TEACHING ENGLISH SPEAKING

Abstract

Guidline of School Based Curriculum (KTSP), the students are expected to master four skills in English subject. They are listening, reading, speaking and writing. Speaking is one of the important skills that the students have to master. The ability to communicate is the primary goal of foreign language instruction that speaking is put ahead on the other skills. On the contrary, for most students speaking is the most difficult part when they learn foreign language. A common problem for foreign language teacher is dealing with passive class because of the students’ afraid of making mistakes and lack of vocabulary. This research was quantitative descriptive research. This research conducted to find out the effect of using information gap task in speaking class. The design of this research was one group pretest-posttest, experimental design. The subjects were class XI IPA 1 SMA YP UNILA consisting of 30 students. In collecting the data, the researcher administered speaking test and interview. The test was given to the students to see how far the students improve their speaking ability.
Based on the data, the researcher found that there were significant improvements in students’ speaking ability. The data shows that value of two tail significance was 0.000 and the sign < α (0.000 < 0.05). It could be stated that the hypothesis was accepted. The mean of speaking achievement in pretest was 64 and the mean of posttest was 72. It means that there was improvement in speaking ability. Information gap task used in this research stimulated the students to speak a lot in the classroom. It can be used to increase the interactions among the students. They became more confidence to express their ideas. They started to speak their ideas and respond the teacher well.

Keywords: completing drawing activity, information gap task, speaking.