1

IMPLEMENTING TEXT TYPE-BASED STORY COMPLETION TO

IMPROVE STUDENTS’ SPEAKING ABILITY

Lolita Falina, Hery Yufrizal, Muhammad Sukirlan

lolitafalinacr@gmail.com

Abstract

Tujuan penelitian ini adalah untuk mengetahui apakah ada perbedaan keterampilan berbicara
antara teks deskriptif dan naratif setelah mereka diambil menggunakan teknik story
completion. Subjek penelitian ini adalah 30 siswa dari kelas X IPA 6. Penelitian ini
menggunakan desain Repeated Measure. Data penelitian dijaring menggunakan tes pada teks
deskriptif dan teks naratif dengan mengambil nilai dari tes berbicara. Hasil penelitian
menunjukan bahwa terdapat perbedaan dalam keterampilan berbicara antara test pada teks
deskriptif dan teks naratif denagn nilai signifikansi 0.05. ini mengusulkan bahwa pemahaman
di teks deskriptif dan kosa kata di naratif teks memudahkan siswa untuk meningkatkan
kemampuan berbicara mereka.

The aims of this study are to find out whether there was a statistically significant difference
of students’ speaking ability in descriptive and narrative texts after they were taught through
the story completion. The subjects were 30 students of class X natural science 6. The study
employed the repeated measure t-test design. The data were collected through the posttests in
descriptive text and narrative text taking the form of speaking tests. The result showed that
there was a statistically significant difference of speaking achievement between the posttest
in descriptive and in narrative texts, with the significant level 0.05. This suggests that the
strong comprehensibility in the descriptive text and vocabulary in the narrative text facilitate
students to improve their speaking ability.

Keywords: speaking, story completion, descriptive, narrative.

 2

INTRODUCTION

Speaking is often regarded as the most important language skill to master. According
to Leong and Ahmadi (2017), speaking is one of the most important skills to be
developed and enhanced as means of effective communication. Hetrakul (1995) says
that the students use English more frequently only inside the classroom and less
frequently outside the classroom. Whereas, students have limited time to learn
English in class, and the still do not have enough encouragement to practice English
outside the class in order to get familiar with English. These cases cause senior high
school students to have difficulties to communicate in English

The students’ difficulties in speaking were due to some factors,one of whichis the
environment where the students live outside the class. The second is the problem on
how the teacher presents the materials. It is found that there are several teachers who
are still unable to create a life-class situation. Teacher-centered activities commonly
happen in the learning process. This indicates that teachers tend to dominate
classroom activities. These conditions may head to students uninteresting class for
students. This circumstance often leads students to the boredom in classroom. As a
result, students become lazy to develop their skill in English, especially in spoken
form.

Based on the researcher’s pre observation and interview with the English teacher of
SMAN, it can be reported that the teacher still found several problems in teaching
speaking. Firstly, the students still faced the difficulties to speak fluently in front of
many people. They were sometimes shy to express their words. They were also afraid
of speaking English before in front of their friends. They were worried about making
some mistakes in grammar, and then they suddenly stopped speaking due to lack of
vocabulary. It was because they seldom use English to communicate with their
friends. Secondly, the teachers still used limited number of technique to teach
student’s speaking in teaching narrative text. The teacher often used drama technique
 3

to teach. Therefore, the teacher really needed some information about new techniques
for teaching speaking, especially in oral communication.

To cope with the problems, the teacher should find the technique to teach the
student’s speaking. One of recommended technique is Story Completion. This
technique was introduced firstly by Kayi (2006). In this research, the researcher
modified Story Completion technique. The students in a group are asked to complete
the story which is previously told by the speaker based on the part given by the
teacher. Before that, the teacher should begin the story that must be completed by the
students. It is going to be an interesting technique because every student is motivated
to speak, ignoring the error that they will make later on.

Therefore, this study was intended to investigate the difference of the story
completion technique in descriptive and narrative texts on the students’ achievement
of speaking.

METHOD

This research was a quantitative research. The researcher used repeated measure
design. The subjects of this research were the first grade students of SMAN 9 Bandar
Lampung in 2017/2018 academic year. This research employed one class as the
experimental class. This research was conducted in six meetings. The first and second
meetings were for treatment by using story completion based on descriptive text, and
the third meeting was for posttest using descriptive text. The forth and the fifth
meetings were for treatment using story completion based on narrative text, and the
last meeting was for posttest using narrative text.

To collect the data, the researcher used speaking test and recording as the
instruments. The test was story completion test. This research also provided content
and construct validity, also inter-rater reliability to measure the consistency of test.
Students were in the form of group while having the test. Students’ speaking was
scored from their recording by two raters in terms of five aspects of speaking by
 4

Haris (1974:81), which were comprehensibility, vocabulary, pronunciation, grammar,

and fluency.

RESULTS AND DISCUSSION

The objective of this research was to find out the difference of students’ speaking
ability in descriptive and narrative after being taught through story completion and
the aspects of speaking are performed best by the students in descriptive and narrative
texts after being taught through story completion. the population of this research was
the first grade students of SMAN 9 Bandar Lampung. The researcher took X IPA 6
class as the sample of this research. This class consists of 30 students this research
was conducted in six meetings; first and second, the researcher administered
treatment for descriptive text by using story completion technique. Third, the
researcher administered posttest of descriptive text. In the fourth and fifth, the
researcher conducted the treatment for narrative text by using story completion
technique. In the last meeting, the researcher administered posttest of narrative text.

The researcher used SPSS 16.00 to analyze the scores of the posttest in descriptive

and narrative text in the class. The mean score of descriptive text was 72.93, the
highest score was 98.00, the lowest score was 52.00, and the median was 72.00.

From the result of posttest in descriptive text, it showed that the total score of

students’ pronunciation was 108, the total score of students’ grammar was 101, the

total score of students’ fluency was 107.5, the total score of students’ vocabulary was

110.5, the total score of students’ comprehensibility was 120.

After conducting posttest for descriptive text and treatments for narrative, the

researcher administered the posttest for narrative text. This posttest was administered

to measure the students’ speaking achievement in narrative text by using story

completion technique.
 5

From the result of the posttest score for narrative score, it showed that the total score

of students’ pronunciation was 70, the total score of students’ grammar was 101.5,

the total score of students’ fluency was 97, the total score of students’ vocabulary was
109, and the total score of students’ comprehensibility was 107.

From the statistical calculation by using SPSS 16, it was also found that there is

significant difference of students’ speaking ability in descriptive and narrative after

the being taught through story completion. The result of hypothesis testing showed
that the significant 2 tailed is p=0.009 and the level of significant is if p<0.05.

There were many possible factors that contributed to the difference of story

completion technique in descriptive and narrative texts. The factors related to the
aspects of speaking.

Firstly, there were difficulties faced by students in their pronunciation and grammar.

It was because the highest difference between two tests was in their pronunciation.

Pronunciation was probably one of the hardest skills in English to learn, especially

for students. It takes a lot of time and effort to improve pronunciation. Some students

still had difficulties in pronunciation. They pronounced wrong even though what they
meant could be caught by the other students.

Further, pronunciation has five main areas of difficulty. They are pronunciation of

individual sound, word stress, sentence stress, rhythm, intonation. One of the most

mistakes in pronunciation that students did was in intonation. Intonation in narrating

the story especially for narrative text is important but not all the students could use

good intonation. It was in line with Tongyin (2016) that it would be difficult to
increase the number of students through narrative. The students were not able to tell
 6

the story with the correct intonation. When they told direct speech, they were still flat

in telling it. Whereas, using direct speech made the story funnier, creative and also it

could catch the attention of the audience. They made the story not interesting even

though they were good in making story. Likewise, in descriptive, it does not have

direct speech. Not only in direct speech, the students did not know when to leave
room for a pause. They always continued the story without thinking about full stop.

Another problem faced by the students was in descriptive text. Students had lower

mistake in descriptive. They could pronounce and also made a good sentence in a

good grammar when they were in treatments. Grammar was the only aspect in

narrative that had higher score than descriptive. It was because the students forgot

about adding s/es in verbal sentence in simple present tense. Besides, students

actually knew how the good one is. They just forgot because the test was speaking

test, which was they had to tell the description directly. It was in line with Etherton

(2004). He states that many students forget to add ‘s’ to the verb when the subject is

‘he’, ‘she’, ‘it’ or an equivalent singular word.

Another aspect was comprehensibility. The average score of comprehensibility in

descriptive was higher than narrative. It was because descriptive text tells about fact.

So the students could predict what she/he meant. For instance comprehensibility,

most of their speaking was easy to follow, their intention and was always clear

through rather halting in delivering, but one students’ speaking was rather

complicated so the listener can understand a lot of what is said, but she/he must

constantly seek clarification. So, descriptive text was easy to be understood. It was

supported by Gusmiati (2013), she states thatof the 5 types of discourse analyzed, the
discourse of description is more easily understood by students.
 7

In narrative, the best aspect performed by the students was vocabulary. It was

because the students were familiar with the story and some of them had read the

story. It was in line with Sarudin et al. (2016) that for children who are exposed to

story books, magazines and educated adults found their language acquisition

increasing faster. It made the students have a lot of vocabularies related to the
narrative text.

In the other words, descriptive was easier to present. In addition, descriptive text is
simple and doesn’t need any rules besides narrative text was pushed to have more
creativity. This statement was in line with Ellis et. al (1989), that a descriptive text is
considered as the simplest and easiest writing form compared to narrative, recount, or
procedure, particularly for the beginning writers in narrative.

Above all, it can be concluded that the story completion is effective in improving

students’ speaking ability for descriptive text in SMAN 9 Bandar Lampung.

Therefore, story completion can be used as an alternative teaching in teaching

speaking.

CONCLUSIONS AND SUGGESTIONS

Conclusions

Based on the results of the data analysis and discussion, the researcher concludes that

there was significant difference of students’ speaking ability in descriptive and

narrative after being taught through story completion, and comprehensibility was the

aspect performed best by the students in descriptive text whereas vocabulary was the

aspect performed best by the students in narrative text. From the hypothesis test it

was known that the significance value (2-tailed) was 0.009 (p<0.05). it could be

concluded that null hypothesis was rejected, and it could be inferred that the story
completion could be used in teaching speaking in descriptive text.
 8

Suggestions

Some suggestions are provided for the teachers and further research. English teachers

are suggested to use story completion technique in teaching speaking especially in

descriptive texts because the technique facilitates students to enjoy learning process

and stimulate the students’ speaking ability, in implementing this technique, the

teachers are suggested to give more attention to students awareness in grammar

because grammar was the lowest score in descriptive.

There are also some suggestions for further research. Further research needs to

compare the other types of texts. Then, further research also to conduct this technique
at different levels of students.

REFERENCES
Ellis, A. Standal, T.,&Rummel, M. 1989. Elementary language artsinstruction.
Englewood Cliffs, New Jersey: Prentice-Hall.

Etherton, A. 2014. English alive. United Kingdom: Nelson Thomas Ltd.

Gusmiati, D. 2013. Kemampuan menemukan ide pokok paragraph berbagai jenis

wacana dalam naskah soal UN siswa kelas X SMA SatriaNusantara Binjai.
Medan.

Hetrakul, K. 1995. The second language. http://eserver.org/courses/spring95/ 76100g/

KavinHetrakul.html(Accessed on March 06, 2015)

Harris, D. 1974. Testing English as a second language. Newyork: McGraw HillBook

Kayi, H. 2006. Teaching speaking: Activities to promote speaking in a second

language.The internet TESL Journal. Vol.12. No. 11.
http://itesjl.org/Articles/Kayi-TeachingSpeaking.html.

Leong, L., &Ahmadi, S. 2017. An analysis of factors influencing learners’ English

speaking skill. Malaysia: University Sains Malaysia.

Sarudin, A. Osman, Z. Janan, D., & Noor, A. 2016. Penguasaan bidang bahasa
dalam kalangan kanak-kanan prasekolah. Malim Perak: Universitas
Pendidikan Sultan Idris.
 9

Tongyin. 2016. A grammar of kam revealed in its narrative discoure.China:

Jiangsu Normal University.