Improving Students’ Speaking Skill through Public Speaking

Abstract

The purpose of this study was to observe and investigate the effectiveness of public speaking (PS) in improving speaking skill of Gapura’s students in Kampung Inggris Bali, in Perean, Tabanan, Bali. More specifically, this study analysed whether or not the PS model was effective. PS model is a model on which learners were trained to choose a certain topic following a number of steps including, ‘reading’, ‘memorizing’, ‘delivering’, effective to improve students’ speaking ability. The topics to be delivered were about famous persons including leaders, artists, actors, actresses, singers, influencers all over the world etc, who give positive effect to the world, give good motivation, inspiration, or insight to the audience. The participants were 16 Gapura’s students, 6 boys and 10 girls. Some of the students were fresh graduated of aviation vocational school and later will be called as beginners, and the rest were under graduate students (IT and economy program) and will be called as advanced students. The observation on model was held for two weeks. Adopting a case-study approach, data were collected from surveys, observation, documentations, note-taking, interviews, and questionnaire. The data were analysed qualitatively. The result of analysis indicated that the public speaking model of learning was marvellous to implement to the beginners as well as the advanced students. The beginners were found more motivated in study. They were proved to be able to improve their pronunciation, grammar, vocabulary, to enrich reading, listening, translating, communication ability, as well as to upgrade their self-confidence. However, the advanced students could memorize the text, enrich vocabulary, improve their grammatical competence and master the text more perfectly.