This objective of the research is to find out how role play can reinforce students’ speaking fluency in my teaching and to find out the strengths and weaknesses of the role play implementation to reinforce students’ speaking fluency. Problem encountered in this research was the low students’ speaking competence especially their speaking fluency. The subject of the research was the conversation students of Lembaga Pendidikan Indonesia, Yogyakarta.The research was carried out at Lembaga Pendidikan Indonesia Amerika located in Ruko Tambakmas Jalan Godean KM. 04 Godean, Yogyakarta from May – June 2015. In this study, I used classroom action research method. I carried out three cycles in the research and carried out four steps namely planning the action, implementing the action, observing and monitoring the action, and reflecting the action. Each cycle was the continuum steps from the implementation of the previous cycle.
There were two types of data collection in this action research, quantitative and qualitative data. The quantitative data was the score of the test. Meanwhile, qualitative data was the information of teaching and learning process gotten from interviews, questionnaires, field notes, and observations. The result of the research showed that the use of role play improved students’ speaking fluency. It could be seen from the improvement of the students’ mean score per cycle. For instance, the mean score of students speaking fluency in pre-test was 2.56, cycle 1 was 3.29, cycle 2 was 4.10, and cycle 3 was 4.31 assessed by four indicators of speaking fluency which were speed or access of production, pausing or hesitation, length of run, and language user’s creativity ability. Meanwhile, the information of the learning and teaching process were students enthusiastically enjoyed the learning process using role play and they got new experiences and more opportunities to practice speaking in the classroom.
To sum up, role play can be used to reinforce students’ speaking fluency and to make the class more active but teacher still should control and monitor students’ activity in order to avoid unwanted condition such as noisy and unnecessary things happened in the classroom which are not needed and to make students stay focus on the lesson and the activity provided. The last but not least, teacher should also calculate the time appropriately when implementing role play so that the target of learning progress could be achieved.
Key words: speaking fluency, role play, classroom action research