Students' perception on the use of Think-Pair-Square-Share technique in speaking

Nowadays, English has been considered one of some important and compulsory subjects for students starting from grade 7th in private school or state school. All English skills and components are important but one of the language skills needed for international communication is speaking. It is necessary to teach speaking skill using interesting and effective activities by using cooperative learning method that can be used in both teaching and learning to speak fluently, one of the techniques from cooperative learning method is Think-Pair-Square-Share. Based on the view, the objective of this study is to find out students’ perception on the use of Think-Pair-Square-Share technique in speaking. This study is using descriptive qualitative research. The writer distributed the questionnaire to the students after 3 treatments. The respondents of this study were 33 students of a private Junior High School. The writer also interviewed 6 respondents by using open-ended questions. The result of the findings shows that the respondents gave their positive responses 80% for the four main aspects asked. The four main aspects were the use of the technique, the purpose of the technique, the advantages of the technique and the interaction in group or pairs. However, 20% of the respondents did not agree that Think-Pair-Square-Share gave positive impact towards speaking achievement. There were 3 reasons of their disagreement. The first reason was the technique consumed too much time, the second reason was they could not find suitable peers as their partner or group member who encourage them to achieve higher speaking skill level and the last one was that the grouping process made such a noise that each group could not concentrate on studying. To sum up, Think-Pair-Square-Share Technique is still considered as a good stimulus to improve the students’ speaking achievement. By using this technique, the respondents appeared to be active and enthusiastic in learning speaking skill. They also could interact more with their peers as well as concentrating on studying as long as the teacher could maintain the activities. Applying cooperative learning method gave additional lesson to the students to explore themselves in expressing their opinions and increasing their self-confident while performing speaking skill