The Effectiveness of Using Finger Puppets towards the First Grade Students’ Speaking Achievement at Mts Sultan Agung Jabalsari Tulungagung

Keywords: Speaking, Instructional Media, Puppet English is one of foreign languages which is learned in Indonesian schools at kindergarten until Universities. As a foreign language, it has many problems faced by Indonesian students, especially for those who are learning speaking. They are able to understand the teachers’ explanation, but it cannot stand any longer in their mind. For junior high school students, they only have three hours in a week to study English at school. They need to be facilitated by using appropriate media. One of the instructional media that can be used to teach speaking is puppet. Puppet which an inanimate figure or well knows as doll is funny and interesting. It can stimulate the learners to express their feeling or opinion to be active in speaking. This study was conducted to answer the following research questions (1) How is the students’ speaking achievement before they are taught by using finger puppets as media? (2) How is the students’ speaking achievement after they are taught by using finger puppets as media? (3) Is there any significant different score of the students before and after they are taught by using finger puppets as media? The purposes of the study are: (1) To know the student’s speaking achievement before they are taught by using finger puppets as media. (2) To know the student’s speaking achievement after they are taught by using finger puppets as media. (3)To know whether there is significant different score of the students before and after being using finger puppets as media. This research is experimental design with quantitative approach. In this study the research design used was pre-experimental design in the form of one–group pre–test and post– test. The population of this study was all the first grade students of MTs Sultan Agung Jabalsari Tulungagung. The sample was students of VII-A class of MTs Sultan Agung Jabalsari Tulungagung consisted of 20 students. The instruments used in this research was speaking test (pre-test and post-test). The data analysis was using T-test. The results showed that the mean of total scores of students’ speaking achievement before being taught using finger puppets was (8.00). While the mean of total scores of students’ speaking achievement after they were taught by using finger puppets was (11.25) . from the computation, it revealed that tcount was 14.254. it was bigger than ttable 2.093 and it was significant at level 0.05. Based on the results above, alternative hyphotesis (Ha) states that there was significant difference score of student’s speaking achievement by using finger x puppets was accepted, while the null hyphotesis (Ho) states that there was no significant different score of student’s speaking achievement was rejected. Finally, it can be concluded that finger puppets is effective media in teaching English speaking to junior high school, especially for first grade students of MTs Sultan Agung Jabalsari Tulungagung