THE EFFECTIVENESS OF USING DIRECT METHOD TO IMPROVE STUDENTS’ SPEAKING ABILITY
(A Classroom Action Research)
CHAPTER I
INTRODUCTION
A. Background of the Study
Human being needs each other. As a social culture, human needs to communicate with language as a means of communication with other people. Language is used by people to express and receive some information, message, emotions and so on. There are many kinds of languages used by people such as English, Dutch, India, French, Spanish, Arab, Indonesia, etc. It depends on where the people live. English is a foreign language in Indonesia.
One of the ways of communication is through speaking. For 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 (Fauziati, 2008: 126).
Nowadays English is an important language. It is the key to international currency of technology, science, as well as commerce. As an international language, English has gained its popularity all over the world including Indonesia. In the past English was only taught in high school. In current years, the teaching of English is expanding into primary schools.
English consists of four basic skills that students must master, they are speaking, writing, reading and listening. The first skill is speaking, it controls to learn and to develop of an individual‘s personality. The second one is writing, it is a partial representation of units of language expression. This is the chief means by which thought, ideas and knowledge are preserved. The third is reading, it is to grasp language patterns from their written representation. The fourth is listening; through listening, we build knowledge by taking in new information (Robert Lado, 1983: 143).
Speaking is in many ways an undervalued skill. Perhaps this is because we can almost all speak, and so take the skill too much for granted. Speaking is often thought of as a popular form of expression which uses the unprestigious colloquial register: literary skills are on the whole more prized. The fact that speaking is transient and improvised, and can therefore be viewed as ??????
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