THE EFFECTIVENESS OF ROLE PLAY USING STICK PUPPETS TO IMPROVE THE SPEAKING SKILL OF THE TENTH GRADERS OF SMA NEGERI 1 LOSARI IN THE ACADEMIC YEAR 2014/2015

English is a difficult language to learn for Indonesian learners, especially for the students of Senior High School in villages because they only use their own language in their daily life. Besides, many aspects should be mastered in order to understand it and the infrastructure does not support the teaching learning of English. Based on this condition, the researcher tried to encourage the students of SMAN 1 Losari to experience learning by using role play of stick puppet in learning speaking. This study was aimed to know what is the speaking competence of the students taught with role play of stick puppet and those taught without stick puppet role play, and also to know if there is significant difference between the students‟ speaking competence in the experimental class and control class. The research design was quasi experimental research. The population of this research is the students of the tenth grade of SMA Negeri 1 Losari in academic year 2014/2015. The number of population is 270 students from 7 classes, and the researcher took two classes as the sample, they are X IIS 2 and X IIS 3 classes (IIS means IlmuIlmu Sosial or Social class). This study used pretest, treatment, and posttest to collect the data. The form of the test was oral test and the treatment was given only for X IIS 2 class as experimental group. Descriptive analysis and t-test are used to analyze the data. The result of the posttest showed that the mean of post-test in experimental class was higher than the mean of post-test in control class (79.11>69.51) the interval 9.6 point. Furthermore, the result of t-test score is t-observed is higher than t table = (3.379 >2.023). This means there is significant difference between the students‟ speaking competence in experimental class and control class. In other words, learning speaking by using stick puppet is effective to improve the speaking skill of the tenth graders of SMA Negeri 1 Losari in the academic year 2014/2015