CHAPTER I

INTRODUCTION

This chapter covers the background, problem statement, objective,

significance, and scope of the research.

A. Background

There are four basic skills in English which may be divided into two parts. They

are productive skills and receptive skills. Productive skills cover speaking and writing

and receptive skills cover reading and listening. Learners usually get some problem

toward productive skills especially in speaking English, because the learners must

include other skills when they are speaking.

Speaking is identified to be difficult to learn, whereas speaking is very

important in human life. By speaking, people can communicate with others. Chastain in

Aras (2006: 1) stated that learning to speak is more difficult than learning to understand

spoken language. Someone usually faces some troubles in social interaction like he or

she cannot produce his ideas, arguments, and feeling communicatively. One sometimes

can understand what others say but he or she is not able to communicate it. This may

happen because of low practice, low motivation, less of communicative competence,

and no self confidence. Ideally, if one could understand an expression, he should be

able to produce it.

Speaking practice channels a good speaking performance, particularly to the

accuracy that the students are trying to develop (Amin, 2004:1). In fact, when the

students encounter and use a foreign language, they are restricted in time to use it

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individually, topic-based on theme, and subsequently the complex learning

circumstance. That is to say to perform a practical speaking the students need to learn

who they are, who they are talking to, where they are, and what they are talking about

(Green and Hilton, 1984: 40). In addition, the students need to know how many times

they talk, how much they talk, and how they talk. Therefore, focusing on their accuracy

and fluency is the main learning process to get the students to improve their speaking

performance. The most important thing is they can do the conversation and

communication well by focusing on some elements above.

Based on the observation on 23th November 2017, of second year students in

SMAN 12 Makassar found that the students were not good at English speaking because

of some factors. First, the students do not understand, what actually the aim of speaking

English is. The students practice English speaking only as compulsory to fulfill the task

from the teacher. Second, the students do not have self confidence to speak in front of

the class. Third, they are still lack of vocabulary, low understanding in grammar, and

mispronunciation. Finally, students need to other method in learning. Some problems

above are suitable with some factors that cause the students unable to improve their

speaking. Amin (2004:1) stated that the learning to speak, does not support the students

to get the optimal standard achievement, because some problem cannot be avoided like:

1) the students do not know what their aim of learning English is, 2) the condition and

the situation in the classroom have not been designed naturally for speaking, 3) and the

students still lack the correct application of grammatical rules, the appropriate word

choice and meaning, and the appropriate (acceptable) pronunciation and fluency.

To solve these problems, the teacher should do their best in teaching, they

should realize that teaching is not simply structuring students thinking and applying
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the teaching method selected, but he has to see and perceive what the students want.

The teacher must look for the way of students to be more active. He is demanded to be

more creative in delivering his material, especially in speaking. There are many ways

to encourage the students to speak English. One of the ways is using cooperative

learning in teaching and learning process. Cooperative learning is an instructional

strategy where small teams of students, usually two to six members, work together to

maximize their individual and collective learning. After team members are organized

into these small groups and receive instruction from their teacher, students within the

team cooperate with one another and work through the assignment until each team

member successfully understands and completes it (Foltz, 2009:1). Beside that

cooperative learning also defined as the instructional use of small groups that allows

students to work together to maximize their own and each other as learning (Johnson,

1994:3). One of types of cooperative learning is rotating trio exchange (Isjoni,

2010:51). It is a way for participants to discuss issues with some, but usually not all;

of their fellow participants. The exchanges can be easily geared to the subject matter

of the teaching or learning (Silberman, 2005:92). Like others types of cooperative

learning, rotating trio exchange is one of interesting technique. Basic difference with

other types of cooperative learning is about the rotation of the members. Many

grouping students techniques, but not all of them use the rotation for group member.

Rotating trio exchange is one of the teaching and learning techniques involving

discussion. In the class, the application of rotating trio exchange will meet the

materials and learning objectives stated in curriculum. The materials will be

developed and related to environment, culture, self esteem, and also self confidence of

the students to speak in front of the class.

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The purpose of rotating trio exchange is giving the opportunity to the students

to improve themselves, not only in cognitive aspect, but also the affective and

psychomotor aspect. The teacher can motivate the students that they get opportunity

and time to improve themselves in learning, the students do not feel stress, and the

students can be fun in learning, so the teacher and students can reach the objective of

teaching and learning process.

Based on the argument above, the writer conducted a research under the title

Improving Students Speaking Performance through Rotating Trio Exchange.

B. Problem Statement

Considering the background above the writer formulated the research

questions as follows:

1. Does the use of rotating trio exchange improve the students speaking

performance?

2. What is the students interest toward the use of rotating trio exchange in

improving their speaking performance?

C. Objective of the Research

This research aimed to find out whether or not the use of rotating trio exchange

improves the speaking performance of the students, and also to know about students

interest toward rotating trio exchange.

D. Significance of the Research

The result of the research is expected to be useful and helpful contribution to the

teachers, students, and those who are concerned about language teaching method.
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Rotating trio exchange is one of techniques that can help teachers in improving the

students speaking performance in speaking English and interest of learning English.

This technique also can be useful for the teachers to make speaking English interest for

their students and it can help them to make the active classroom condition.

The result of research also expected to be useful contribution for the next

research either to find out and anticipate the problems which are found in this research,

or the next researchers will be easy to conduct more complete research especially in

class that uses this technique, in this case rotating trio exchange technique.

E. Scope of the Research

This research was under the study of Applied Linguistics. It used technique of

rotating trio exchange to improve second year students speaking performance in SMAN

12 Makassar (IPA 4). It was restricted to English speaking performance in term of

accuracy and fluency by using rotating trio exchange. Speaking accuracy deals with

pronunciation, grammar, and vocabulary. The activity of this technique consisted of

main steps of grouping students into trios, give rotate exchange, and general discussion.

Besides, this research also to know about students interest toward rotating trio

exchange