Developing Supplementary Teaching Speaking Materials for Students in Islamic Boarding School Based Communicative Language Teaching

By Dedi Efrizal

An-Nur Islamic boarding school of Malang is an educational institution where the students stay and live together with dormitory system. In order to support their learning activities, the students were also taught English as the medium to explore English proficiency in learning activities within classroom and communicate each other. Each student was trained to speak English in their daily communication. Unfortunately, most of the second year students in religious senior high school at An-Nur Islamic boarding school of Malang did not perform English either in their teaching and learning activities in classroom or communication with their friends both inside and outside classroom. It happens because of their speaking ability is low which is influenced by their problems during teaching and learning process in classroom. Those problems such as teaching materials that fossilized the students’ activeness and freedom in speaking by burdening them with grammatical patterns, English teaching during learning process seems monotone where teacher teaches the students with traditional, lack of English vocabularies, lack of practice, and fear of making mistakes. But, the main problem was there were not appropriate teaching English speaking materials that give big portion and opportunity for the students to speak actively and freely in order to support teaching and learning process of English speaking.

From the facts above, the researcher is interested in solving those problems and improving the speaking ability of second year students in religious senior high school at An-Nur Islamic boarding school of Malang through developing teaching speaking materials based Communicative Language Teaching approach since speaking is demanded skill in this globalization era (Ur, 2000).

Communicative approach in language teaching starts from a theory of language as mean of communication (Littlewood, 2002). Therefore, the goal of English language teaching is to develop communicative competence. In other words, learning activities in communicative language teaching should attempt to replicate real communication. In this research, the researcher drew a figure of communication continuum in communicative language teaching activity based on Harmer (1998).

Non-Communicative activities	Communicative activities
No communicative desire	A desire to communicate
No communicative purpose	A communicative purpose
Form not content	Content not form
One language item only	Variety of language
Teacher intervention	No teacher intervention
Materials control	Materials control

The emphasis in Communicative Language Teaching on the processes of communication rather than mastery language forms leads to different roles for learners from those found in more traditional second language classrooms (Patel, 2013). Students are expected to interact primarily with each other rather than with the teacher, and correction of errors may be absent or infrequent. The cooperative (rather than individualistic) approach to learning stressed in CLT may likewise be unfamiliar to learners (Brown and Yule, 1999). In addition, student who has good background knowledge, for example, their past learning experience will more interest to join the lesson (Harmer, 1998).

During learning process, generally, teacher is being motivator, assessor, facilitator, and corrector during students’ discussion or speaking in front of the class (Abebe: 2012). Breen and Candlin in Richard and Rodger (1999, p. 77) also described that the teacher has two main roles: the first role is to facilitate the communication process between all participants in the classroom, and between these participants and the various activities and texts. The second role is to act as an independent participant within the learning-teaching group. Especially in the more creative types of activity, unnecessary intervention on the teacher’s part may prevent the students from becoming genuinely involved in the activity and thus hinder the development of their communicative skill (Littlewood, 2002).  In addition, the teacher also should make their lesson interesting so the students do not fall asleep during learning English (Harmer, 1998).

Therefore, developing teaching speaking materials based on Communicative Language Teaching approach is one of the crucial things in order to make the students in Islamic boarding school can communicate actively since speaking is the most demanded skill to be mastered in this globalization era (Kurniawati, 2011). Learning activities with materials based Communicative Language Teaching focuses on real oral communication with variety of language and activities without too focus on form of grammatical patterns if distinguished with non-communicative activities during learning process of English.