DEVELOPING THE “SPEAK AND GO” BOARD GAME TO TEACH SPEAKING FOR GRADE VIII STUDENTS OF JUNIOR HIGH SCHOOL

Abstract

The objectives of this research were: 1) to find out the target and learning needs of learning speaking of Grade VIII junior high school, and 2) to develop an appropriate board game to teach speaking to Grade VIII junior high school students. This research was classified into research and development (R&D) study. This study adapted the ADDIE steps proposed by Branch (2009). They are analyzing, designing, developing, evaluating, and revising. The subjects of the study were 31 Grade VIII students of SMP Negeri 2 Wedi. There were two kinds of data: quantitative and qualitative data. The quantitative data were collected by distributing questionnaires to Grade VIII junior high school students for needs analysis and to an expert for expert judgment. Then, the data were analyzed quantitatively through simple descriptive statistics. Meanwhile, the qualitative data were obtained from the interview with the English teacher and then were analyzed using qualitative data analysis model proposed by Miles and Huberman (1994). The final products of this research are the board game for Grade VIII students and a guidebook for teachers. The target needs are that the students need language function, vocabulary, and grammar to help them speak communicatively and fluently. They also need to learn head, ellipsis, and backchannel as features of spoken grammar. Then, the students need Asking for and Giving Opinions, Asking and Stating about Abilities, and Asking and Telling Information about Daily Routines. In terms of learning needs, the inputs are in the form of short dialogue or monologue. The activities are carried out by playing the game, doing role plays, identifying the meaning of some words, and identifying the features of spoken grammar in the classroom in group. The students’ role in the class is to participate actively. Meanwhile the teacher’s role is to be interactive teacher. The developed media consist of six components: a game board, three topics of instruction cards, achievement stars, achievement cards, a set of rules, and the game pieces (6 pawns and 2 dices). The teachers’ guidebook consisted of the description about the board game, how to use it, and sample activities before playing it based on the given topics. From the results of the expert judgment, the overall mean score for the developed media is 3.29 which is “Very Good”. Therefore, the “Speak and Go” board game is able to help the students learn to speak in the speaking class.

Keywords: speak and go, board game, speaking, Grade VIII