The Effect Of Student Teams-Achievement Divisions (STAD) Technique Toward Students Speaking Skill and Class Participation at Grade XI of SMAN 5 Kota Bengkulu

Speaking is one of the important skills in English. Unfortunately, there are many problems encountered by students in English speaking skill such as students had difficulty to master vocabularies and to pronounce the words, the students weren‘t confident to speak in front of class and weren‘t accustomed to working together in studying English. Besides, the students also didn‘t respond actively when the teacher asked a question, reluctant to participate in class discussion, and showed inappropriate comments when closing class discussion. STAD provides students with a great opportunity to develop their speaking skill and their participation in the classroom. The purpose of this research was to find out the effect of STAD technique toward students‘ speaking skill and class participation at grade XI of SMAN 5 Kota Bengkulu in academic year of 2011/2012. This research was quasi-experimental research. The population of this research was the students at grade XI of SMAN 5 Kota Bengkulu in academic year of 2010/2011 that consisted of 168 students. The sample of this research was IPA 4 which comprised 27 students and IPA 5 which comprised 27 students and the two classes were cluster randomly selected as a research sample. The data were collected through speaking test and observation sheet of class participation. The data were then analyzed by using t-test and analysis of variances. The findings of this research showed that (1) the students who were taught by using STAD technique gave significant effect toward their speaking skill achievement. (2) The students who were taught by using STAD technique gave significant effect toward their class participation. (3) The students who were taught by using STAD technique gave significant effect toward students‘ speaking skill and class participation. The findings show that STAD can incresease students‘ academic achievement and their participation in the classroom. The elements of STAD such as mixed-ability grouping, individual accountabiltiy, group reward and also an equal opportunity are considered as a trigger for the findings. Thus, it can be concluded that STAD technique gave significant effect toward students‘ speaking skill and class participation at grade XI of SMAN 5 Kota Bengkulu in academic year of 2011/2012.This research implies that the use of STAD can be chosen as a technique in teaching speaking. English teachers are suggested to use STAD as an alternative technique in teaching speaking and to implement it to increase students‘ class participation in the classroom. Other researchers are suggested to conduct further research related to findings of this research by employing other speaking skill rubrics and observation sheets of class participation.