Using the Internet to Develop Speaking Skills

IN daily life students frequently use Internet communication just to chat and look for entertainment. The challenge for teachers is to direct students to use information technology as a learning resource related to innovative learning. Teguh Sudjatmika, a district facilitator in Nganjuk, has developed teaching methods that use the Internet as a source of learning materials that can be easily understood by the students.

Teaching materials that are downloaded from the Internet and used by the students, can be beneficial for the students so that they learn to use the Internet to in a positive way. In the article below he shares his experience of presenting Competency Standards related to speaking English, more particularly expressing meaning in an oral functional text and simple short recount monologue related to the local environment.

I started the lesson by asking my grade 8 students about their experience in taking part in a Study Tour to Borobudur temple. I gave the opportunity for each group to answer questions briefly in English. This question and answer activity took place to help the students to explore their experiences. The activity lasted about 10 minutes.

After that I began the core activities by conducting brainstorming. In this part of the lesson I showed pictures of an aviation accident in the United States on the projector. Then I started telling them about the aircraft accident based on information obtained from the Internet. In addition to displaying the plane crash images, I displayed some images associated with the key vocabulary that students were going to be using.

In the next activity I gave out copies of the images to each group. From the pictures each group was asked to find vocabulary; nouns, adjectives, and verbs associated with the images. In this activity each group was enthusiastic about writing their work on the white board. The activity quickly became competitive. I provided an incentive in the form of a prize of a new pencil to each of the groups taking part. Of course I also gave my comments to each learner as part of the assessment process.

After we had brainstormed the vocabulary for long enough I asked the students to make sentences in the simple past tense related to the images the students had. First we gave oral examples of sentence. All groups were given the opportunity to express their ideas. Then the sentences were written on the board.

Based on examples of sentences made ??by my students I elaborated further on the use of the simple past tense and the sentence patterns. After each group had finished reading out their work, I told them to search for information on transportation accidents by downloading material from the internet. Each group was asked to save its findings on a flash disk or CD. Given the limited amount of equipment and time, each group was expected to present the images they obtained from the internet in English during the next lesson. After each group had made their presentation, other groups asked questions.

For the next activity I asked each student to download information on social events and natural disasters from the internet. This task could not be done in the classroom because of limited resources. So the students had to do this at home and the results were stored on a flash disk or CD. This task is intended to teach each student to operate computers and use the internet as a source of knowledge. In addition, this task was used to measure achievement of the basic competencies mentioned earlier.

Students discussing in their groups the picture of an aircraft accident

A representative of a group of students giving an explanation about the incident in English using their own words