ABSTRACT
This final project is action research. In this study, I limited the discussion by stating the following problem: “how is the achievement of the eighth year students of SMP 13 Semarang of the Academic Year 2006/2007 in producing spoken descriptive texts by using cue card?”. The aim of the study was to describe the process of teaching and learning spoken descriptive text by using cue card and to find out the improvement of students’ achievement in using cue card as the teaching medium to the eighth year students of SMPN 13 Semarang of the Academic Year 2006/2007. It is expected that the result of the study will provide a deeper understanding of the use of cue card as a teaching medium.
There were four steps in conducting the Action Research i.e. planning, acting, observing, and reflecting. This action research was done in two cycles. The first cycle was how to describe animals, while the other was how to describe person.
The result of the study showed that using cue card as a teaching medium improved the average of the students’ speaking grade of the eighth year students of SMP 13 Semarang academic year 2006/2007 by 18.4 point, including students’ fluency (31.3 point), pronunciation (25.3 point), but unfortunately the grammar aspect did not improve (-1.3 point).
Referring to this action research, I offer several suggestions. First, I suggest that the English teacher should try to use cue card as one of the teaching media. Second, English teacher should encourage the students to improve their speaking skill by giving more practice and exercise, such as retelling story, performing speech, practicing dialogue, and so forth. Third, I suggest the students to improve their mastery of present tense so they can produce good descriptive texts.
