Role play as a means of developing oral communicative competence to Senior High School students

Most of the Senior High School Students still cannot communicate in English although they have learned it for six years; i.e., in the "SMP" and "SMU". It is due to the fact that the time allocated for mastering speaking skill is limited. It seems that the English teacher seldom gives speaking class to his students. As the consequence, the students cannot develop their oral communicative competence. Oral Communicative Competence is an ability to choose the language forms and use them orally in appropriate situations. To solve this problem, in this thesis the writer suggests the English teachers to use role play. The using of this technique is based on the communicative approach as what has been stated in 1994 Senior High School curriculum. Here, the writer suggests to use role play because role play has some advantages that can develop students' speaking ability (oral communicative competence). The advantages are: (1) Role play motivates the students to take part actively in communication activity through their roles. (2) Role play closely relates to the outside world, so motivates and gives opportunities for the students to practice English as if they were in a real situation. (3) Role play helps the students to use the verb forms and vocabularies in appropriate way and manner in the right place according to a certain situation. (4) Role play makes the students resourceful and have self assurance in expressing themselves in various situations. On the other hand, the disadvantage of role play is role play tends to use large amount of time space and people. In order to apply the contribution of role play in the teaching of speaking, the writer put forwards three suggested steps. They are: (1) Preparation in which the teacher prepares the topic and situation. (2) Presentation which includes activities that lead students to communicate in the form of a role play. (3) Evaluation in which the teacher evaluates the student's communicative competence: the grammatical sentence, pronunciation, and useful expressions