IMPROVING THE STUDENTS’ SPEAKING SKILL

THROUGH STORY JOKE TECHNIQUE

(A Classroom Action Research at Eighth Grade of Junior High School)

A THESIS

Submitted to The English Department

Written

Name : NUR DWI

ENGLISH DEPARTEMENT
SCHOOL OF TEACHER TRAINING AND EDUCATION
2010
 CHAPTER I

INTRODUCTION

A. The Background of the Study

Nowadays we come to the globalization era. English is one of the language

in the world that master in many various field globally. English is a media for

communicating both speaking and writing. Now, many companies have policy to

their employments to have English both oral and written. And English also has role

in transferring science and technology.

English has four skills, reading, listening, speaking, and writing. Speaking is

useful for language acquisition provided that students more or less understand what

they speak, the more they speak, the better they get at it. Speaking is an activity by

someone to communicate with other.

One of the language skills that have to master by students in learning a

foreign language like English is speaking. Many students find difficulties in

speaking English. Some factors are fear of making mistake, fear of be laughed at

their friends, and having less confidence of their own ability. Therefore, teacher

should help the students to overcome this problem by motivating them to speak. For

this reason, teacher should use effective teaching methods that encourage students to

take a part actively in every activity. The teaching-learning process

should involve not only between teacher and students, but also between students

and students.

Based in the 2006 National Curriculum, the students have to knowing

English is communicating language, and we have to prepare the students to

challenge globalization era.

Mostly of the teaching method before the past decades, found the teacher

tend to carry out the teaching process in the classroom by applying traditional

and monolingual principle ways of teaching unsatisfactory. This shows that

teacher need enrichments with appropriate ways of teaching atmosphere, that

why in teaching English as the second language by applying new and modified

fashions in order that the result of teaching learning process would contribute

more input to reach satisfied learning outcome. Whole around the world

recently, where the people encourage that English as their target or second

language used based on whole interaction and communication holding the

dominant role of very aspects of their life. English is most widely used in

teaching learning process of broader educational occasions either formal or

informal environment.

English language teacher should also be able to play their role as

facilitator for students in their attempt to acquire the spoken language. In the
 3

sense that English language teachers should facilitate students in learning the

spoken language by giving many oral practices.

It is becoming a challenging task for language teachers to establish a

successful language classroom. Foreign language classes have to incorporate

playful dimension, thus the possibility for making the class as an instance of

learning and a moment of fun becomes a key element of successes in a language

class.

There many ways to make a fun activity in conversation class. Using

pictures, card, and other visual aids usually add a great joy to class. Language

teacher use them as meaningful teaching aids in order attract students’ attention

and facilitate them to understand the lesson better.

Considering problem, relating to speaking activities in class and helping

students to improve their speaking skill is part of teacher’s job. Teacher expected

to have right teaching techniques to provide students with appropriate teaching

materials and create a positive classroom environment. Therefore, the students

will have opportunity to use English among themselves. The teaching- learning

process should not only happen between teacher and students but also between

students and students.

The other ways are doing group discussion, conducting role play, games

and using jokes. These can reduce students’ boredom and allow students to

interact with others naturally and may crate good competition among them. The

joke is potential too crating humorous situation. The element of surprise from

joke frequently makes the class atmosphere more pleasant.

The use of humor makes the class atmosphere more pleasant, increases

interaction among teacher and students, makes learning more meaningful and

enjoyable, is a useful tool to get students’ attention, motivates learners, and most of

the time, pleases students.

In this research, the researcher attention is utilizing jokes as the way to

make classroom activities fun, especially conversation class. The reason of using

story joke in this research, because researcher feels that story joke is effective

teaching technique and pleases an you give more opportunities to students to

make turns in speaking during the times allocated. The researcher assumes that

story joke is combination between language practice and fun. They can express

their ideas freely because they do activities with their friends. This ways also

easy to admiser and flexible in terms of subject matter and design.

Teachers have long been aware that motivating students and lowering

their anxiety are important. So why don’t more teachers utilize humor in their

classes? There are many answers to this question. First, many teachers believe

humor is too personal for the classroom, where there is a group of individuals
 5

with differing beliefs. Thus, they fear they might easily offend someone. Second,

others see the use of humor as something that could lead to discipline problems

and, as a consequence, to the teacher’s loss of control of the class. Also, some

argue that humor is time consuming, increases teacher talking time, and may

increase learner dependence. Another common reason is a disbelief in the

seriousness of humor. The idea of the teacher as a performer may not sound

professional to some of us. "Are students really learning anything?" these

skeptics would ask.

There are many ways to make an activity fun. The element of surprise,

for instance, frequently adds joy to class. Well-chosen pictures, cards, and other

visual aids, as well as realia in general, are usually of great help. The use of

music and sounds can also do the trick. Have students sing songs in different

rhythms or tones of voice, for instance. It is always a good idea to have students

change seating arrangements, work in groups, and complete short activities.

Assign activities in which they must walk around and use body language and

mimicry to express themselves and their feelings. Remember to please not only

the mostly visual and auditory learners but the kinesthetic ones as well. All that

will help the class to be more dynamic, and therefore, more fun.

Moreover, try to create humorous situations for role-plays and

dialogues. Changing the context of that tedious role-play in the textbook to a fun
 6

one that allows the same structure to be practiced will make quite a difference in

the end. You may also have students change the tone of their voices and dress

differently, reinventing the character, while role-playing. Another nice technique

is to attribute students’ names to the characters in role-plays and skits. You can

always throw in one or two intelligent jokes every now and then, and, above all,

play games.

There are many benefits to implementing humor or jokes in the

classroom: it creates a cooperative atmosphere helping students to better relate to

one another, and it focuses them more effectively. It adds a cultural frame to

language by presenting a tone, expression and context to the material, thus

increasing cultural knowledge. Humor facilitates the acquisition of vocabulary

and helps distinguish figurative from literal meaning. Similarly, it helps develop

visual memory and improves the capacity to solve linguistic problems. The

devices that we can use to add humor to a language class range from idiomatic

expressions, riddles or proverbs, to pronunciation games, comics, and the use of

realia, jokes or typical grammatical errors.

Humor or jokes is closely related to memory, as it is usually easier to

recall an experience that occurred in a humorous context. When recalling a

television commercial, or a political joke just heard on the subway, we are often

surprised by the amount of aural and visual information we are able to retrieve.
 7

Given the lasting impact of humor, a teacher must consider what communicative

and methodological objectives he or she wants to achieve in order to use it in the

classroom.

A joke is a device that creates linguistic awareness in the classroom.

Understanding and creating humor in a foreign language means that a language

learner is consolidating knowledge and making progress. The different activities

presented here are just some of the procedures to be explored in order to show

students that learning a foreign language is actually fun. Humor transforms the

ambience of the class when students enjoy sharing their playful strategies with

others. When everyone benefits, the acquisition of a foreign language becomes

“easy,” and learners become motivated and creative.

Using humorous or stories joke in learning to speak; it is expected to increase

confidence in students as well as the ability to speak English. By collaborating

role play, frequently asked questions, and filling in a simple text individually, in

pairs works, or groups.

But by using the story of a joke, a teacher must be able to classify where

the funny stories that can be understood by their students. Because of different

cultural influences that will affect the understanding of humorous stories for

students, could be considered funny story that happened in another country but

will be felt not funny for our culture.

This is where the ability of teachers to recognize cultural and language forms

will be more challenged.

B. The Identification of the Problem

From background of study, the researcher will identify problems that

related in this issue, as follows:

1. What are the goals of teacher who use the story joke to improvement the

speaking ability?

2. How does the teacher teach speaking through story joke?

3. How does speaking have positive effect on students’ speaking ability?

4. How significant is using story joke on students’ speaking skills?

5. How to use jokes in speaking class?

C. The Limitation of the Problem

The researcher would teach speaking through the story joke for

developing speaking skill Junior High School’s students in. Because the

researcher find, the effective method to teach using this technique. Especially

for junior high school at eight grade.

D. The Formulation of the Problem

Based on the limitation of the problem above, the researcher formulates

the study as follow: How does the researcher improve the student’s speaking

skill through the story joke at 8th grades?

E. The Benefit of the Study

The study is expected to give a contribution to the variety of method in

teaching speaking.

1. For the researcher expects that English teacher, especially those who

teach speaking advance learners, will broadly use the result of the study.

This would become interesting and useful source for teacher to teach

speaking, what goals it would be best to teach and what strategies and

tactics are best suited for teaching these goals.

2. The benefit of this research for eighth grade in Junior High School that

the headmaster of the school knows actually teaching and teaching

speaking are really acceded by the teacher. The students of course the

headmaster tries provide the equipment of speaking so that, the students

speaking can be improved by practicing actively.

3. The students can have a good reference for their knowledge and

someday they will make tries connected with learning speaking. Then

they may make some references of this thesis.

By using story joke in teaching speaking skill to the eighth grade students of

Junior High School; it motivates and encourages students to practice speaking

English. It makes them enjoy expressing their feeling, ideas, opinion and even in

messages and suggestions. Since it is fun activity, it helps students to take port

in practice.