Employing Short Films in Teaching Recount Text to Improve Senior High School Students' Speaking Ability

ABSTRAK In English, there are four language skills to learn: listening, reading, writing and speaking. Speaking has an important part in our life since we use it to communicate with others. In this study, the researcher aimed to find out how short films can be used to improve the speaking ability of the tenth graders of SMA Negeri 1 Singosari. Short film is authentic videos which provide visual supports that can motivate the students to learn. The design of this study was Classroom Action Research (CAR). The subjects were 32 students of class IPS A/17. In collecting the data, the researcher used questionnaires, students’ participation checklist, field notes, speaking test, and also interview guide for the English teacher as the instruments. The collected data were then analyzed to know whether the implementation of the strategy was successful or not. The findings of the study revealed that employing short films can improve the students’ speaking ability of IPS A/17. In the preliminary study, there were only 3 students out of 30 (10%) who got 75 or higher. In the speaking test after the implementation of the strategy, there were 22 out of 30 students (73%) who scored 75 or higher. The students’ participation was also improved in each meeting. In the first meeting, there were 45% of the students who actively participated in the learning process and the percentage of the students’ participation in second to fourth meeting was 57%, 62%, and 73%. The steps in the strategy that have been proven to improve the students’ speaking ability were, step one is watching the short films without subtitle, step two is watching the short films with subtitle and accompanied by a worksheet, step three is listening to the audio parts of some parts of the short films to be practiced, step four is working on a jumbled text worksheet and discussing some vocabularies and meaning, step five is an individual activity. Besides, the findings also showed that all of the students felt that the strategy was a fun way to learn speaking and it helped them improve their speaking performance. Finally, it can be concluded that employing short films can improve the students’ speaking ability as well as their participation and it was a fun way for the students in learning speaking. Therefore, it is suggested that English teachers implement the strategy of teaching speaking using short films as an alternative. Moreover, the English teachers are also suggested to implement the five steps of using short films. For further researches, the findings of this study can be used as a reference. It is also recommended that further researchers extend the time of implementing the strategy to discover more valuable results of using short films in English speaking class