ELT FORUM 1 (1) (2012) Journal of English Language Teaching http://journal.unnes.ac.id/sju/index.php/elt THE INFLUENCE OF USING VOICE BLOG ON STUDENTS’ SPEAKING ABILITY OF ANALYTICAL EXPOSITION Ratih Laily Nurjanah Department of English, Faculty Language and Arts, Semarang State University, Indonesia Abstrak Tujuan dari penelitian ini adalah untuk mengamati bagaimana blog suara digunakan untuk mengajar eksposisi analitis lisan dan untuk mengamati apakah blog suara memberikan perbedaan yang signifikan dalam menin- gkatkan kemampuan siswa berbicara tentang analisis eksposisi.Desain penelitian adalah eksperimental kuantitatif.Teknik pengumpulan data menggunakan Tes lisan, dan rubrik evaluasi.Data dianalisis menggunakan formula uji-t, untuk mengetahui apakah ada perbedaan yang signifikan antara skor rata-rata kelompok eksperimen dan kelompok kontrol. Hasil penelitian menunujkkan skor rata-rata post test kelompok eksperimen lebih tinggi kelompok kontrol. Oleh karena nilai t hitung lebih tinggi dari t tabel-, maka itu berarti ada perbedaan yang signifikan antara kemampuan anali- tis siswa yang diajarkan menggunakan blog suara dibanding mereka yang diajarkan tanpa blog suara. Abstract The objectives of the study was to observe how voice blog is used to teach spoken ana- lytical exposition and to observe whether or not voice blog gives significant difference in improving students’ speaking ability of analytical exposition.To achieve the objec- tives of the study, an experimental quantitative research was conducted. Spoken test, and rubric of evaluation were used to collect the data. The technique to analyze the data was t-test formula. It was used as a technique to determine whether there was any significant difference between the means of the score of the experimental and the control group or not. The mean score of the post-test of the experimental group was higher than the mean of post-test of the control group. And the t obtained value (4.703) was higher than the t critical table (1.67). Since the t-test was higher than the t-table, then it means that there was a significant difference of the spoken analytical exposition text score of the students who were taught using voice blog to the score of those who were taught without voice blog. © 2012 Universitas Negeri Semarang ISSN 2252-6706 Info Artikel Sejarah Artikel: Diterima Januari 2012 Disetujui Februari 2012 Dipublikasikan Agustus 2012 Keywords: Voice blog Spoken Analytical exposition  Alamat korespondensi: Gedung B3 Kampus Sekaran, Gunungpati, Semarang, 50229 E-mail: ratihfbs@unnes.ac.id Ratih Laily Nurjanah/ Journal of English Language Teaching 1 (1) (2012) 2 Introduction Using blog for English teaching and lear- ning process can be so interesting for students because they tend to like using and taking part in acitvities familiar to them. The technology, for them, represents a fun activity. By blogging, te- acher feedback can be given instantly in the form of comments or as a response to what the stu- dents has produced or poted on their blogs. Each student is free to demonstrate what they have been learning and their thoughts on a given topic, ideas, or concepts. Galien (2010), on her journal, pointed out the advantageous of using blog in ESL/ EFL classroom; they are: (a) increased peer interaction among students, (b) increased teacher interaction with the students, (c) students exhibi- ting more positive emotions about learning, and (d) an increased sharing of ideas among students and with the teacher. The use of voice blog was firstly introduced by Yu Chih Sun in his study Voice Blog: An Exploratory Study Of Language Lear- ning. Voice blog as a medium for students to improve speaking skill helps students to have a lot of chance to practice their speaking skills. First, teacher will give them a model how to produce good spoken text. The page on voice blog will help teacher to show to students. It starts from making an outline and draft. Second, The students will learn how to select words and sentences which are appropriate for them by using mini dictionary provided in the blog. This mini dictionary helps students to choose some words which may be sui- table for their thesis.. Third, they will be guided by teacher to conceptualize their thoughts about an issue by doing a brainstroming. Fourth, stu- dents are guided to write their concepts into an outline or a draft and then post them to the voi- ce blog. Fifth, they will be helped by teacher to organize the outline into meaningful and logical sequence, in this case is analytical exposition text. Sixth, they ‘memorize’ what they have organized and produce it in form of spoken language to be recorded and uploaded to the voice blog to comp- lete the outline/ draft they have posted before. Te- acher can evaluate or assess the students speaking skill by visiting the pages and giving feedback in form of comments. methods I used experimental study to observe the improvement of students’ speaking skill in spo- ken analytical exposition. Arikunto (2006) says that an experiment is the way in which a resear- cher created a situation or an event which was then analyzed in order to find out the effect that it made. Each control and experimental group in- volves 18 students of eleventh grade of SMA N 1 Tuntang as the objects of the study. This study took 5 meetings which were held on November 19th to November 28th 2011. In this study, there a two type of test, pre- test and posttest, which were conducted at the first and last meeting. The score of the test is based on the some categories. They are grammar, vocabulary, fluency, pronunciation and content. On each category, there are five items that have different score. The score are 1 up to 5 to each item in each category, so the total of all items are 25. Here, I modified my own rubric of evaluation which is suitable for English as foreign language students. The mean score of each test reached by control and experimental group was the result of the statistics: M = ∑x/n Where : M = mean ∑x= the sum of students’ scores n= the sum of students and then the mean was used to get t-obtained value by using this formula: Voice blog was used during the treatment, second to fourth meeting, given to experimental group as a medium to improve the students’ spea- king ability. I used t-test method to observe whet- her or not voice blog gives significant difference (Brown, 2004) Result and Discussion I conducted the pre-test on November 19th 2011. The students of experimental and control group were introduced to analytical exposition and taught about generic structure, lexico gram- matical features, etc. Students were given models how to read an analytical exposition text. Later, they were given an issue and were asked to discuss the issue in pairs. The issue for this pre-test was ‘Cigarette and Students’ Last, they had to deliver their opinion about an issue orally individually. While students delivered their opinions, I recor- ded their performances. And from each record, I wrote the transcript so I could actually catch the mistakes or errors made by students by matching the record with the transcript and then assessed the performances one by one. I assessed the per- 21 n 1 n 1 s xx t 21 + − = 3 Ratih Laily Nurjanah/ Journal of English Language Teaching 1 (1) (2012) formances based on the certain chriteria made before. From this pre-test, the result was unsatis- fying, since students made errors and mistakes in pronouncing familiar/ common words; such as: students, school, etc. They couldn’t perform the good spoken texts because they had limited vo- cabularies so they were not able to expand their main ideas. The mean score gained by experi- mental group was 64,7 and control group gained 67,5. From the scores, found that t-obtained value of pre-test was -1.478. The first treatment was done on November 23rd 2011. The activities in this treatment were using voice blog to help students arranging outli- ne and draft for their spoken analytical exposition text. The issue for the treatment was “Free Sex among Students”. First, students were reviewed the pre-test material about analytical exposition in sub-page ‘What to Do’. And then, from this page they learned how to prepare a good spoken text. It was start by making an outline. In this page, they could find an example of outline so they could learn how to make it as the example given. This page provided vocabularies to help students decide which words were suitable for their thesis, whether agree or disagree. Next, stu- dents did the second step of preparing a good spoken text, it was making a draft. This page gave an example of draft which was developed from the outline. The drafts they have made were up- loaded to the blog to “Students’ Works” page to be viewed by teacher and commented as the feed- back. Students could view the comments at home and revise the drafts for the next performance so the process of teaching and learning didn’t stop at school. In this activity, students are helped by voi- ce blog in choosing words and improving voca- bularies into an outline and arranging sentences with correct tense into a draft by providing mini dictionary and examples of outline and draft. So, students’ difficulties which was found in previous session (pre-test) may be solved. The second treatment was done on Friday, November 25th 2011. In this meeting, students are helped by voice blog to perform spoken analyti- cal exposition well by observing the script and examples given on the blog. Students performed the speech based on draft they had revised before. The performance of students were recorded and uploded to the blog so the teacher could listen to them and left comment as feedback. At home, students can view the comments and prepare themselves to perform the revised version. In this session, teacher tried to solve students’ difficulties by correcting pronounciation with voice blog as the medium. Students still did some mistakes and errors even in pronouncing common words such ‘students’, ‘parents’, and spelling ‘HIV’. The third treatment was the last treatment. It was done on Saturday, November 26th 2011. In this meeting, the students performed the re- vised version of their last records and recorded by teacher. They compared the last records with the recent ones. From this acitivity, I concluded that students can accept the comments well since most of the records showed improvement in pro- nounciation and fluency. Teacher left comment again to motivate students in performing the best spoken analytical exposition. The post-test of the both groups were con- ducted on November 28th 2011. The students were asked to perform the spoken analytical text and recorded by teacher. The issue for this post test was “Social Networks and students”. From the result, students’ score showed improvement and the records sound better compared with pre- test. The step and the chriteria used in this post- test were same as the pre-test ones. First, students were given the issue. And then, they applied the steps taught in the treatments. Last, they per- formed one by one and teacher recorded their performances. Teacher wrote the script of each performance and matched the script with the re- cord. From the analysis found that students of experimental group suceeded in improving their speaking ability by gaining higher score than the previous pre-test. They are able to solve their dif- ficulties in making some errors and mistakes in pronouncing words, expanding their ideas and arranging their ideas into proper generic structu- re of analytical exposition text. The mean score of experimental group in this test was 90. On the other hand, the control group did not show sa- tisfying improvement since they kept repeating the same mistakes and are not able to arrange a good analytical exposition texts. The control group reached 80 as the mean score of post-test. From the mean scores of those two groups, the t-obtained value of post-test was 4.594. This improvement can caused by the use of Voice Blog of Spoken Analytical Exposition in teaching spoken analytical exposition in expe- rimental group. This blog helps students to solve their difficulties in 5 aspects of scoring speaking skill. The difficulty in vocabulary aspect was sol- ved because voice blog provides mini dictionary which helps students to get their words easily but still motivates students to enrich their vocabula- ry knowledge by not providing the meaning of words. In this case, students still have to look up their dictionary to find the meanng of the words. The students were helped to solve their gram- Ratih Laily Nurjanah/ Journal of English Language Teaching 1 (1) (2012) 4 mar difficulties because voice blog provides clear example of how to arrange the words into a good analytical exposition. The example was in the form of draft not in the form of tenses formula so students were motivated to conclude from what they read. Moreover; they have learned simple present tense before. So the draft was purposed to keep them in the right track of arranging words into simple present tense. The improvement on pronunciation was caused by the chance given by teacher via voice blog for students to have a gui- de in practicing their performance at home. This chance happened through the comments from the teacher left as the feedback on each student’s work in every meeting. This thing also happened to the improvement on fluency aspect. Students have more time to keep on practicing perform their spoken analytical exposition at home be- cause they were motivated to perform the best for the blog since the blog is also visited by ot- her students. Teacher’s comments also causes the improvement on content aspect. By noticing the guideline from teacher in developing ideas, stu- dents were helped to arrange their spoken text script with good and relevant content without ig- noring their own opinion of the topic. The effec- tiveness of using voice blog is also caused by the blog itself. Students nowadays are really close to internet and working with internet becomes one of their interests. This blog actually supports the process of non-stop teaching-learning by giving chance to students and teacher to communicate outside the classroom and school hours. Teach- er can view the works carefully and give suitable feedback, while students are motivated to prepare the best performance at home. And this blog also gives students complete examples and guides for students. Conclusions Voice blog can be used to teach spoken analytical exposition by guiding students to fol- low the steps to perform good spoken analytical exposition. Voice blog leads students to make an outline, draft, and gives students chance to prac- tice at home so it helps students to solve their difficulties in spoken analytical exposition. Voice blog is used by teacher as a medium to observe students’ improvement by viewing their works on the blog and giving them comments as feedback for students. Voice blog can improve students’ speaking ability by giving sinificant difference in students’ scores. It was proven by the t-obtained value of post-test (4.594) which was higher than t-critical value (1.67) which means that there was signifi- cant difference between the score of post teas of experimental group and control group’s. References Arikunto. 2006. Prosedur Penelitian: Suatu Pendekatan Praktek. Jakarta: P.T. Melton Putra Brown, H. D. 2004. Language Assessment: Principles and Classroom Practices. New York: Longman Galien, P. and W.L. Bowcher. 2010. Using blogs in ESL/EFL teaching and teacher-training. Asian EFL Journal. Professional Teaching Ar- ticles, 42/2: 4 – 23. Online at www.asian-efl- journal.com/pta-February-2010.pdf [acessed 04/05/11]