IMPROVING STUDENTS" SPEAKING SKILLS THROUGH ONLINE GROUP DISCUSSION

Students are often encouraged to speak in the classroom, especially during a speaking class. Speaking class offered different activities for students to enhance their speaking skills. One of those activities is group discussion. The implementation of small group discussion in learning speaking has been widely researched before. However, as the pandemic forced teachers and students to study online, the investigation of using group discussion in online environments to improve students' speaking skills is minimal. This study addresses the mentioned gap by exploring improvements in students' speaking skills during and after online group discussions. This study employed classroom action research involving fifteen students who had completed online group discussion lessons in one class. Five from fifteen students were interviewed to gain students' more profound responses towards online group discussion implementation. The data was collected through interview, observation, and speaking tasks. The findings show six aspects in online group discussion that contribute to students' speaking skills improvements: the speaking opportunities, good habit formation in speaking, experience sharing, learning assurance, active participation, and interesting ICT features through online group discussion enactment. Because of these aspects, students improved their speaking skills; grammar, comprehension, vocabulary, fluency, and pronunciation