CHAPTER I INTRODUCTION A.

Background of The Study

In many aspects of humans life, one of the most important things is communication. It enables people to share and get information. One of the tools that people use for communication is language. Language is a tool of communication that has four basic skills, they are listening, speaking, reading and writing. In order to communicate each other, people can use both spoken and written language. Spoken language concerns with listening and speaking skill, and written language concerns with reading and writing skill. In spoken language, listening skill is mostly used as the input of the information whereas speaking skill is mostly used as the output of the information. People listen to any languages in order to acquire information they need, and they speak in any languages in order to communicate, ask and share the ideas in their mind. Basically, learning all the basic skills in language such as listening, speaking, reading and writing is important. Because one skill correlates to one another and they support each other. If we look at the progress how babies learn a language, they will start from listening. When their parents or people around them are talking, they will firstly learn the language by listening. After that by the time they are growing, they start to be able to produce words and they start to speak a language. After that, they continue to learn how to read and write. In learning a language, we will always concern to speaking as one of the four basic aspects in language, as well as in learning English. Some people may think that learning speaking is the second boring thing to learn after learning grammar. But, there are also most of students think that learning speaking is one of the most important thing to learn in learning a language. Many language learners regard speaking ability as the measure of knowing a 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. For many language learners the primary goal of learning a foreign language is to be able to speak it. Teaching should therefore facilitate them to achieve that goal to the best of their ability. Yet the job is not easy, because situations in the

classroom are very different from those in real life. There speaking normally occurs in a domestic, social or occupational environment. Except for the fairly infrequent occasions of a talk or a lecture, only a small group of people, typically two people, are involved. At times people speak to each other simply to demonstrate friendliness or sociability, but much the most frequent case is that one person has a reason to address the other: to request information or service, share experience, suggest action. The other replies and a dialogue happens. Speaking seems to be an important skill that a learner should acquire. It is very important in order to enable students to communicate effectively through oral language because the disability of the students to speak may lead them to be unable to express their ideas even in a simple form of conversation. One of the aims of most language programs is to develop spoken language skills and most programs aim to integrate both spoken and written language. Learning a language means using it in communication in oral or written form, and being able to express feeling, thoughts, and experiences in various contexts. Lado (1964: 51) states that to know the language is to use it. He further states that students do not know a sentence until he can speak it. In the matter of fact, the English instruction in some schools does not demonstrate a satisfactory result. Many students fail to reach the goal of the English teaching. They are not able to communicate with the language either orally or in written form although they have learned English for years. Many of the learners in a speaking class are reluctant speakers. This reluctance is partly due to their prior learning experience. We cannot deny the fact that this failure is caused by many problems during the instructional process. The problems of English teaching seem to be of particular importance. They have become interesting topics to discuss and analyze, especially those who are directly involved with the teaching of English. However, the most important thing is that as the English teachers, who are directly involved with the instructional activities, must try to look for the best solution to overcome the problems in order to reach the target of the teaching of English. Based on the preliminary study conducted at The State Junior High School 2 Jambi City, the researcher found out some problems related to the instructional

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activities in this school. Those problems are that the students have low speaking ability and the students have low motivation in learning English. The monotonous teaching technique used by teachers might cause low motivation on the students in learning English which affect their ability in speaking. Most students are unmotivated in learning as the result of the teachers monotonous teaching techniques. The students soon get bored and uninterested in learning. When they are always exposed to the monotonous instructional activities; and therefore, they do not participate actively. This instructional process happens even though the students are not showing their interest in this kind of classroom activity. Theoretically, it is impossible for the students learning English with low motivation to have good speaking ability if they are inactive during the instructional process. For example, the students with low motivation will be defensive to use their English in oral communication while monotonous classroom does not stimulate them to participate in classroom interaction. In fact, whether or not the students speaking ability improves is greatly influenced by the intensity and frequency of their participation in oral communication. So, it can be said that the root of the problems above is the monotonous teaching technique used by the teacher. Hence, it needs to propose the appropriate technique to overcome the students low speaking ability. It is the responsibility of the teachers to find out effective techniques for presenting the materials in order to stimulate the students positive attitude toward the speaking class. There are many techniques of teaching speaking skill that teachers can use in their class, but there is only one main goal. Davies (2000) stated that the main goal is to develop the students ability to really communicate in English. It means that the students should not only understand the form of a language, but also understand how to use it in real life communication. One of the techniques that teachers can use is using information gap activities. In this activity, students are supposed to be working in pairs. One student will have the information that other partner does not have and the partners will share their information. Information gap activities serve many purposes such as solving a problem or collecting information. Also, each partner plays an important role because the task cannot be completed if the partners do

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not provide the information the others need. These activities are effective because everybody has the opportunity to talk extensively in the target language. Based on the reasons mentioned above, the researcher implemented the use of information gap activities at the second year students of The State Junior High School 2 Jambi. Hopefully, it will be useful to be used by the English teachers at that school or other people as one of teaching technique among many other techniques in improving students speaking skill.

B. Identification of Problems
In the preliminary study, the researcher found out some problems in speaking activities in English subject. There most of students at second grade of The State Junior High School 2 Jambi city at VIII A class had problems in speaking activities. They were reluctant to speak English. They also preferred to be silent and smile when they were asked to speak English. They were also lack of vocabulary and did not know what to speak. Those are the reasons why their speaking score is still low.

C. Limitation of Problem
This research was limited into the implementation of information gap activities in teaching speaking about asking and giving opinion and inviting, accepting and refusing invitation at VIII G class of The State Junior High School 2 Jambi city.

D. Formulation of Problem
Based on the background above, the problem of this research is formulated into: How can information gap activity improve students speaking skill at VIII G class of The State Junior High School 2 Jambi city?

E. Purposes and Significance of The Research

1. Purposes of the research The purpose of this research is to improve the students speaking skill through information gap activities at VIII A class of The State Junior High School 2 Jambi city.

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2. Significances of the research Significances of this research are as follow: a. To help students improve their speaking skill, especially in

pronunciation, fluency, and accuracy; b. To give contribution to teachers and the researcher himself to innovate learning strategy, especially in teaching speaking; c. To give a starting point to other researchers to conduct further study about teaching and learning English, especially in teaching English by using information gap activity.

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