Improving Students’ Speaking Competence Using Authentic Materials

Abstract

This study focused on the implementation of using authentic materials in improving the students’ speaking competence in a bilingual boarding of high school in Central Java. The goals of this study are, (1) to describe whether the use authentic materials can improve the students’ speaking competence in class, (2) to reveal the difficulties of using authentic materials in this research. I adopted Classroom Action Research (CAR) which requires four steps, namely planning, implementing, observing, and reflecting. The participants are 26 high school students. The methods of data collection are observation, diary, interview, photograph, pre-test, and post-test. In analyzing data I used (1) constant comparative technique by Burns (1999) (qualitative), (2) descriptive statistic technique (quantitative). After analyzing the data, I found out that the change in improvement of the students’ speaking in class is seen clearly and all the responses from the students are positive. The average score of the students` speaking skill increased from 63.46 to 79.80.