USING THE ROLE-PLAY TECHNIQUE TO IMPROVE THE SPEAKING SKILLS OF GRADE XI STUDENTS OF SMAN 1 PANGGANG IN THE ACADEMIC YEAR OF 2014/2015

This research was aimed at improving grade XI IIS students’ speaking skills at SMA N 1 Panggang by implementing the role-play technique. It was carried out based on the procedure that had been planned before. The study was action research. It was conducted in two cycles with two meetings in each cycle. The subjects of this research were 30 students of class XI IIS 2 at SMAN 1 Panggang. The data obtained were qualitative and quantitative. The qualitative data were gained from the observations and the interviews with both the English teacher and the students. The data were transformed into field notes and interview transcripts. Meanwhile, the quantitative data were gained from the speaking tests that were administered before the action implementation and at the end of every cycle. There were five validity principles applied in this research; they were democratic validity, outcome validity, process validity, catalytic validity, and dialogic validity. Furthermore, to assess the trustworthiness, three triangulation principles were implemented: time triangulation, space triangulation, and investigator triangulation. The actions implemented in this research were implementing the role-play technique, preparing the worksheet for the students, providing activities that enabled the students to enrich their vocabulary by encouraging the students to open the dictionary, using various medias during the teaching and learning, giving more explanation about the use of modal verbs, providing activities to improve the students pronunciation, and implementing pair work to make them have more opportunity to practice to speak. The results of the research showed that the implementation of the role-play technique in the English teaching and learning process was effective to improve the students’ speaking skills. They could perform more confidently. Moreover, their motivation and enthusiasm in English learning also improved. Furthermore, there was an increase from 12.9 to 19.3 from the pretest to the posttest. The improvement significant (p