IGA As a Method to Promote Students’ Speaking Ability

Abstract

Speaking is one of productive skills that should be learnt by the students. Nevertheless,
 the students faced difficulties in speaking. Therefore, Information Gap Activity is offered
 to solve the students’ problem in speaking. This research focuses on implementing
 IGA in teaching speaking. It aims on describing the implementation of IGA in teaching
 speaking and discovering the strengths and weaknesses of IGA. This research
 employed classroom action research. The first researcher acted as a lecturer and
 the second as an observer. This research was conducted on two cycles; each
 cycle consisted of three meetings, one pre-test and post-test. The participants of
 the research are 40 students of first semester of IKIP Siliwangi. Observation sheet,
 speaking test, and interview were used to collect the data. The data, then, were
 analyzed qualitatively using descriptive statistic and data triangulation. Based on the
 result, the implementation of IGA could develop the students’ ability in speaking.
 Besides, there were three strengths and one weakness in implementing IGA; they
 are: IGA could motivate the students in learning better, it coud help the students
 to improve the score of speaking, and it activated the students to work in a pair
 well. In other word, this method created a chance for them to help each other.
 Besides, the students could solve the problem by exchanging information. However,
 the weakness found in this research was this method, IGA, needed much time to
 apply so that the researchers felt that it was hard to use perfectly due to the limited time.