IMPROVING STUDENTS’ SPEAKING ABILITY THROUGH SELF TALK STRATEGY (STS) AT THE 10th GRADE OF SMA N 3 PEMALANG

The objectives of this research were to find out the achievement of the students’
speaking skills after applying the Self Talk Strategy (STS) and to find out the
result of the students’ speaking achievement taught before and after implementing
Self Talk Strategy (STS) at the 10th grade of SMA Negeri 3 Pemalang. This
research used a quantitative and pre-experimental method with one group pre-test
and post-test design. The 10th grade students of SMA Negeri 3 Pemalang served
as the population in this study, and class X.5, which included 34 students, served
as the sample. A spoken test with pre-test and post-test served as the research
instrument. The result of the data indicated that there were significant differences
between the students’ pre-test and post-test. The post-test means score (12.82) for
speaking students was higher than the pre-test score (10.06). Moreover, the t-score
is regarded as less than the t-table at a significance level of 0.05%. The alternative
hypothesis (Ha) was accepted and the null hypothesis (H0) was rejected. It
indicates that there was a significant shift in the way the students spoke in class
before and after using the self-talk strategy. The researcher concluded that the
application of the Self-Talk Strategy (STS) improved the students' speaking
abilities based on the findings and discussion of the research.
Keywords: Speaking, Self-Talk Strategy, Accuracy Fluency