Teaching Students’ Speaking Skill by Using

Board Games
(A Quasi Experimental Study at the Tenth Grade Students of SMAN 1 Parung)

YOVIE ANGGARA SAPUTRA

Teachers Training and Education Faculty

Tanjungpura University

mpayne487@gmail.com

Abstract: think the best way on getting students’

The purpose of this research was to
prove that the application of board game
affected students’ speaking skill at grade 10
of SMAN 1 Parung. Since it was the quasi-
experimental research, the researcher used
pre-test, treatment, and post-test as the steps
for conducting research. With the purposive
sampling, 40 students of X MIA 2 class as the
sample of research and 40 students of X MIA
3 class as the controlled group. The reason
why the researcher took these two sample
was they had similar score. Interview and
monologue test included on both pre-test and
post-test where it considered as the oral test.
The researcher divided five meetings for the
treatment itself which the students of
experimental class played board games that
designed by the researcher. The result of the
research is the mean score of experimental
class was 67.05. After using board games, the
mean score increased to 76.20. It means that
board games is effective towards students’
speaking skill.
Keywords: Speaking skills, CLT, board
games
INTRODUCTION
Teaching English productive skills is
a tricky challenge by teachers. They have to
attraction. One of the productive skills is
speaking. Improving speaking skill is one of
the purposes of English education in
Indonesian school from elementary to the
university students.
Based on the syllabus, it should be
achieved in speaking skill for the tenth-grade
students in the first semester dealing with
some functional skill such as transactional
and interpersonal skill. The materials
included talking about yourself, starting a
conversation, making a date, describing
things, instructing people how to do things,
and getting to know each other.
According to the observation
conducted by the researcher, most of 10th
grade students of SMAN 1 Parung find their
worst while having speaking class. They have
some number of problems that they face
during the learning process. The first one is
they lack of confidence and also lack of
grammar. This thing could be happened
because they only taught everything about
grammar rules. As the result, they have poor
knowledge about speaking and they are also
difficult to produce anything through their
mouth. Secondly, students do not have any
interest during the teaching and learning
process. It is happened because the teacher

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uses monotone technique in the classroom.
The teacher just asks the students to make a
short dialogue in pair to assess their speaking
skills. The third one is the mental of students
itself. They have a big anxious feeling during
the class since they feel afraid to be wrong.
Based on the observation, the
researcher concludes that the teacher has to
be more creative and communicative to
embrace students exploring their ideas
through speaking. to gain the communicative
competency, there is an appropriate method
to be used. It is Communicative Language
Teaching, and it is well-known as CLT. This
kind of method lets the teacher to create more
learner-centered classroom during the
teaching and learning process. CLT has
multiple activities and one of the
implementations of it is board games.
By using games, the teachers’
instruction can be meaningful and enjoyable
for all age groups. When students play games,
teachers can provide the social skills because
it gives the opportunity to the students to
interact with others player. Based on the
background above, the researcher would like
to prove that the board game method is
effective towards students’ speaking skills.
LITERATURE REVIEW
According to Meyers (2003, p2.),
speaking is all about: sharing idea, giving
information, expressing a greeting, stating an
opinion, or sending a warning. Another
definition also stated by different expert.
Speaking is the ability to speak in a foreign
language is at the very heart of what it means
to be able to use a foreign language (Luoma,
2004). It can be concluded that Speaking is
an interactive activity that is delivered by the
people as a speaker, and should be
understood and being listened unconsciously
by the other as a listener. It is also called
communication. It involves two people; the
speaker or the sender and the listener or the
receiver. People can exchange the
information each other through the process
which can be said as communication.
In teaching speaking, there are some
aspects that the teacher must concern about.
It can be used as a guidance to assess the
speaking. According to Hughes (2003), there
are some proficiency that should be achieved
in speaking activities; accent, grammar,
vocabulary, fluency, and comprehension.
Speaking has many purposes that give
some advantages in teaching foreign
language skills. But the advantages or the
function of speaking can be achieved if the
teacher encourages the students by
giving the opportunity and spaces for
students to speak up their thought
and ideas. As Littlewood (2002, p.93) said,
“The development of communicative skills
can only take place if learners have
motivation and opportunity to express their
own identity….”. It means that the learning
should be learner-centered base to make it
more interactive.
Communicative Language Teaching
is an approach in which the communicative
competences are built. In CLT, English
classroom should be more highly motivating
for the students to use the language in
learning process. The teacher should make
communicative classroom activities to
engage the students in language. The material
of teaching and learning should be based on
students‟ daily live. It is effective in order to
build social-interaction in students.
Speaking is the second skill that
people got after listening. People imitate to
speaking after they listen the other speaks. It
is not easy to learn speaking skill. As other
skills, there are some characteristics can
make speaking difficult. As Brown (2001)
demonstrates some characteristics of spoken
language can make oral performance easy as
well as, in some cases difficult: Clustering,
redundancy, reduce forms, colloquial
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language, rate of delivery, stress, rhythm,
intonation, and interaction.
To solve those problems, there is a
way to reduce it called board games. A board
game is a game that when you play it you
throw the dice in the counters and you can
step forward based to dice. A board game is
a game that involves counters or pieces
moved or placed on a pre-marked surface or
"board", according to a set of rules. Games
can be based on pure strategy, chance (e.g.
rolling dice) or a mixture of the two, and
usually have a goal that a player aims to
achieve.
In using games to teach, the students
are able to get other function of games
besides mastering speaking skill. Mayer and
Harris (2010) said by using games they can
get many life skills as follow: authentic
experience, student engagement, social and
life skills, and higher- order thinking as some
goals in board games.
There are some studies dealing with
this study. The first one came from
Rahmawati (2012). It was effective to teach
English by using a board game. She
concluded that the students‟ speaking skills
was improved. The result of the research
showed that the use of board games in
combination with applying various media in
the presentation, using songs, using
classroom English, and conducting listening
activities was able to improve students’
speaking skills. Susanti (2005) also
conducted the study for vocabulary learning
of grade 8 students while the researcher
conducted the research for speaking activities
of tenth grade students.
METHODOLOGY
This research applied quasi-
experimental method using two groups’ pre-
test post-test design. There were two groups
on this study: Experimental group and
controlled group. Each group did the same
pre-test and post-test through interview and
monologue test. The only difference was on
the treatment, where the experimental class
taught by using board games and the
controlled class had the traditional class
activities. The result of pre-test and post-test
of both groups compared in order to examine
whether the treatment given in experimental
group gave more significant effect on
students’ speaking achievement. As it drew
below:
The population of this research was
the students of tenth grade of SMAN 1
Parung. There are 8 classes in this grade. The
writer used purposive sampling to choose the
classes who almost have the same score.
The researcher chose class X MIA 2
with 40 students as the sample of
experimental group and class X MIA 3 with
40 students as control group. The pre-test was
given before the treatment. Moreover, the
post test was given after the writer gave the
treatment to each class.
To know the effectiveness of teaching
speaking by using boardgames, the writer
gave oral test to the students. The oral test
was divided into two parts; the pre-test and
the post-test. The form of oral test was
interview and monologue test. Because it is
oral test, the writer divided the score into five
criteria, which are the scores of
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pronunciation, grammar, vocabulary, fluency
and comprehension. Here was the technique
of data analysis that used by the researcher:
There were two hypotheses that can
be formulated on this study:
1.Alternative Hypothesis (Ha): There is a
significant difference between students’
speaking scores taught by using board games
and without by using board games for the 10th
grade students of SMAN 1 Parung.
2.Null Hypothesis (Ho): There is no
significant difference between students’
speaking scores taught by using board games
and without by using board games for the 10th
grade students of SMAN 1 Parung.
The result of t-test can be seen with
the criteria:
 If t-test (to) > t-table (tt) in significant
degree of 0.01, Ho (null hypothesis) is
rejected.
 If t-test (to) < t-table (tt) in significant
degree of 0.01, Ho (the null hypothesis) is
accepted.
FINDING
The experiment class and the
controlled class were taught speaking with
different technique. The experimental class
was taught by using board games, whereas
the controlled class did not use board games
activity. The data were collected from
students’ score in pre-test and post-test of
both experiment class and controlled class.
The Diagram of Mean Score
80
75
70
65
60
EXPERIMENT CONTROLLED
Pre-Test Post-Test
From the diagram above, it is clearly
stated that there are significant results in
experimental class where the bar is getting
higher rather than in the controlled class. It
meant that the board game had positive
impact towards students’ speaking skills.
DISCUSSION
In order to find out the empirical
evidence about the effectiveness of board
games in speaking class, the researcher
compared 10th grade students’ score of
SMAN 1 Parung before and after the
treatment by using board games. The
previous study suggested that there are some
positive impacts on applying board games in
speaking class like vocabulary mastery at 8th
grade students (Susanti, 2005, p.2). Other
study also clearly stated that board game also
motivates students in speaking class while
they can practice effectively (Jayanti, 2012,
p.2). The only difference on this study from
the earlier studies was the research subject
where the researcher chooses 10th grade
students on testing the effectiveness of this
method.
For the experimental class itself, they
were taught by using board games and the
regular teaching activity for the control class.
The experimental one achieved the best while
practicing their speaking and they enjoyed
the class during the treatment. They engaged
with their friends a lot because this game
needed bigger contribution in team works
that absolutely let students to express their
ideas. It is true alongside with the previous
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study that teaching English through game-
like activities can cheer up the class and make
language learning more pleasurable and
easier to learn (Wang, 2010, p.133). Board
games also helped students to reduce their
problem in speaking, like redundancy and
hesitation. Wang (2010) found that games are
self-motivating to stimulate learners’ interest
and curiosity, which benefited learners best
to play with the language in their first stages
of language learning. It was noted that board
games motivate students to forget about their
problems.
Since it was a quasi-experimental
research, the data is mostly served in the form
of tables and numbers. As stated by Creswell
(2012, p.21) that the data is collected on
predetermined instrument that yield statistics
data. The result revealed that there was a
significant progress of student’s pre-test and
post test score between the experimental
class and the controlled class. There was a
significant growing on experimental class
from the mean of pre-test score to the post-
test one. It was totally different on the
controlled class since there was no treatment
for them which made a little progress of the
pre-test score mean to the post-test one.
However, this method should be considered
that it consumes long enough time to show
the effective of the study is.
On the other hand, some students still
did not have any progress of their speaking
even they belong to the experimental class.
Luckily, most of them had better progress to
reach their best on speaking. It means that
this kind of method is truly helpful to them in
case of performing better on speaking. It was
critically achieved after the treatment where
the researcher conducts the post-test in form
of interview. There were ten questions that
asked to them and they can answer it all
without any doubt. It was absolutely different
when they have pre-test activity, even the
level of question was easier than post-test.
Although this study had a consistent
result with the previous studies, this could be
something controversial since it is in form of
games. Most of teachers might think that
students will not be serious on learning and
rather to waste their time. Remember that, the
teacher has to think about how to motivate
their students to learn something. There are
so many methods and techniques on
engaging students to the learning process.
With the improved and better design later on,
this kind of study will assist teachers to make
the speaking learning more fun and attractive
in the future.
CONCLUSION
Based on the research discussion, the
researcher concluded that board games
technique is effective towards students’
speaking skills. The result of the students’
mean score is increased significantly
comparing from the pre-test and the post-test
result. Based on the hypothesis testing result,
the increasing level of score is categorized as
high. It can be interpreted that students’ score
of speaking is better after they taught by
using board games.
The researcher recommends some
suggestions according to the research
findings. The first one is the teacher can use
this technique in order to have better result on
students’ speaking skill. The other suggestion
is the researchers can use this research as a
reference in case of conducting the relevant
study.
REFERENCES
Meyers, A. (2003). Gateways to Academic Writing.
New York: Addison Wesley Longman)
Luoma, S. (2004). Assesing Speaking. Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press
Hughes, A. (2003) Testing for Language Teachers,
Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
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Littlewood, W. (2002) Communicative Language
Teaching: An Introduction. Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press.
Creswell, J. (2012). Educational Research
(4thedition). United Kingdom: Pearson
Wang, Y. (2010) Using Communicative Language
Games in Teaching and Learning English in
Taiwanese Primary Schools. Journal of Engineering
Technology and Education, 7(1)
Mayer, B. Harris, C. (2010) Libraries Got Games.
(Chicago: American Library Association.