The Use of Storytelling to Improve Students' Speaking Ability

Abstract

Speaking is a secondary skill in language, coming before reading, and writing skills. In this modern area speaking skill plays an important part in negotiation to make deals internationally, such as promoting, debating, arguing, and complaining. English is one of the international languages, which is a compulsory subject in Indonesia. By and large, teaching speaking in English is not an easy endeavour. In fact, students tend to be shy just to say a few words in English. In other words, it is hard to make them speak up. As the consequence, English teachers should exert their efforts to make their students practice speaking in a relatively convenient way. Storytelling can be used as an alternative technique to teach speaking, at least to make students speak English at their own pace. This paper is going to explore how a teacher can make use of storytelling in delivering speaking class. It will deal with the background of using storytelling, the advantages and the procedure of delivering speaking class, and the students’ comments upon experiencing speaking class by means of storytelling. The methods used to collect the data are observation and questionnaires. This study was conducted by involving English teachers and students of senior high school. The results show that the use of storytelling in teaching speaking could make the students express their ideas freely and the students were motivated to speak in English no matter how broken their English was.