Facilitating EFL Students’ Development of Speaking Skills through Cue Card Media

Abstract

This paper aims to investigate the use of Cue Card Media to facilitate the improvement in the English speaking competence through storytelling based on the recount text at the grade 10 students of SMK 1 public vocational high school using Cue Card Media. This Classroom Action Research employed four main stages by Kemmis and McTaggart’s (2014) model, including planning, action, observation, and reflection. The present proposed CAR study was undertaken at the SMK 1 public vocational high school Gorontalo as the site for this study, with the grade ten students majoring the program stream of travel business or Usaha Perjalanan Wisata (henceforth UPW) being the subject of this study. The data in this research were collected by using several instruments, to include checklist observation, questionnaire, and speaking test. Further, the analysis reports of this CAR study relied heavily upon the qualitative interpretation, whilst quantitative served to strengthen the qualitative data interpretations. The results found that the application of the Cue Card successfully enhanced students’ speaking skills by 26.28% statistically, with 55.56% in the first cycle and 81.84% in the second cycle. Following the open-ended survey questionnaires, it appeared that due to the efficacy of Cue Cards, these attractive speaking media benefitted students when it comes to speaking performance activities, yet the drawbacks of Cue Card learning media in speaking were also recognized. Discussions as to how Cue Cards may develop the practice of speaking instruction were also provided. This study adds to the growing pool of literature on the Cue Card implementation in the teaching of speaking skills in English.