CLOZE DICTATION CHAPTER IV&V

CHAPTER IV

RESEARCH FINDINGS AND DISCUSSION

            This chapter explores findings of the study and the discussion to answer the problem statements mentioned in Chapter I. It had four sections. Section A describes the condition before the research. Section B describes the process of the research. Section C describes the implementation of the research. Section D describes research findings and discussion.

A. The Students Condition before the Research

            The condition before the research was identified in pre-research stage. The pre-research was held to identify the problems during the teaching and learning process of listening comprehension and to identify the current students’ listening comprehension competence. The students’ problems were also identified at this stage. There were three activities in the pre-research stage namely interviewing the students, obeserving on the teaching and learning process of listening comprehension, and conducting pre-test.

            In teaching learning process of listening comprehension to English Department students of STKIP PGRI Ngawi, the lecturer normally used textbook. The listening activities were also based on the textbook. Concerning with the problems, the researcher at least there were two problems including: 1) students had low listening comprehension and 2) the lack of students’ reading and writing skills by exposing the student to the written form of the language as he listens to the spoken form; and students were poor to recognize sight words and to make associations of sounds with letters.

           There were some indicators of the students having low listening comprehension: 1) students were unable to discriminate sounds, 2) students were unable to identify main idea and listening, 3) students were unable to listen for detailed information. Students’ listening ability’ scores are unsatisfactory or low.

            The classroom situation was often not alive indicated by: 1) students did not show high interest in learning materials, 2) they did not show high motivation in learning listening, 3) they did not pay attention to the lesson and 4) students did not participate in listening class activities.

Table 2 Situation Prior to Action Research

Problem	Indicators
a. Students’ listening ability	·         Students were unable to discriminate sounds, identify main idea and listen for detailed information both text and sentence. ·         The students’ scores were low.
b. Classroom Situation	·         Students did not show high interest in learning materials. ·         Students did not show high motivation ·         Students did not pay attention to the lesson. ·         Sudents did not participate in listening class activities.
c. The Causes of the Problem	·         The text book that did not attract students. ·         The materials in the text book were not relevant to student’ life. ·         The class activities were often monotous.

           

To be more details, the condition before the research is described in the following section:

a. Students’ listening ability

            The students’ competence between listening ability was showed by the result of the final listening pre-test before the action research. The result of the test revealed that their listening ability was low. The low competence in listening could also be identified from the indicators shown in table above. First, students often listened to a spoken text, they tended to just keep silent.

            Second, students were unable to discriminate sounds in sentence and functional texts. So, when asked about information they got from text they found difficulty in word writing. For example they always had writing mistakes in phonemes such as /the/ into /that/, /historical/ into /history/, and /nineteen/ into /ninety/. Second, they were unable to identify main idea and listen for detailed information. In short, they did not understand between the listening ability. The result of pre-test also showed that the students still had some problems on listening as described above.

b. Classroom Situation

            Generally, the teaching and learning process of listening in class I B could be described as a passive class. Other lecturers even said that the class was very different from other classes of the same level. The students were actually diligent enough in attending the lesson although this was merely because their attendance also became the consideration in scoring system. Contrary to the fact, this class was rarely seen to be alive as lectures commonly expect to be.

            The materials of listening presented to the students were very limited and all were taken from a book where in Madiun there are very limited bookshops. It is very difficult to find suitable books that provide listening materials that meet the need of the learners. Those affects the way the lecturer taught them that was finally commented to be monotous. As a result, the class was not inspiring and cause students not interested in learning.

            The result of the observation showed that students were not really interested in the materials. They said that listening class was boring and could not motivate them to listen. This situation was also indicated by some students who did not show high motivation in learning listening. The students did not pay attention to the lesson. They also did not participate in listening class activities. Students prefered to be ignorant in class. Because of these reasons the classroom situation became dull and not alive. When asked to answer comprehension questions, most of them were just confused and ignored the tasks. All of these evidences lead to students’ failure in teaching and learning process.

c. Causes of Listening Difficulty

            Based on the researcher’ observation the causes of listening ability problem were the lecturer and students.

            The causes from the lecturer were the monotonous teaching learning process; some English lecturers at the college where the researcher carries out a research still used the teacher-centered method and traditional method in teaching listening. Some of them just focused on listening conversation and monologue after that they ask to the students to choose the best option based on the context. These could be seen from the result of the questionnaire before the research (see appendix 8 p. 135). 96.67% of the students stated that they did not like listening subject. 90.00% of students did not discriminate sounds.93.33% of the students did not identify main idea. 90% of the students answered that the lecturer never giving a method which was easy to be understood by the students. These made them feel bored with the teaching technique used by the lecturer.

            Finally, many of them could not do pre-test well. In fact 23 students did not pass with a score under 70.00. 63.33% of them felt disappointed when they could not do the test. To overcome these problems the researcher gave motivation to them, selected interesting material, and observed them do the task in individual work. So it possibly did not improve students’ listening ability.

B. The Process of the Research

            The research was conducted collaboratively in English Department of STKIP PGRI Ngawi. In conducting the research, the researcher was assisted by an observer, who is a pronunciation lecturer at English Department of STKIP PGRI Ngawi. We have been working together in conducting action research to solve problems related to students’ listening ability and the classroom situation, She took part in designing, planning, revising, and discussing the result of the research. The process of the research covered three main stages: pre-research, reserach implementation, and discussion of the research result. In pre-research stage there were three main activities were interviewing students, observing the classroom practices, and giving pre-test to students. In pre-test stage the researcher gave students listening test to find out the students’ competence in listening ability. The pre-test consisted of 30 items covering the skills of discriminating sounds, identifying main idea, and listening for detailed information. The pre-test was conducted in 60 minutes, with the number of subject of  30 students.

            After the pre-test activities had finished the researcher interviewed 3 students before the treatment was implemented. The students who were interviewed had different ability in listening class. One student who had low, average, and high score in listening class. The aim of the interview is to find out the difficulty in learning listening comprehension and the students’ opinion about the listening class. The result of the interview was used as the basis to be considered in designing lesson plan including materials, class activities, technique etc.,for the next meeting.

            The researcher always discussed many things with collaborators. They were about designing the plans that were implemented in the classroom while the researcher was implementing the plans to the students, how to correct and score the students’ work. Furthermore the reseacher asked suggestions for better treatment of classroom practice.

            Based on the result of pre-test, interviews and reflection of the previous condition, the reseacher design appropriate treatment to be implemented in the classroom. The source of the problem was found that the technique given were monotonously  so cloze dictation was applied in teaching learning process. The treatment in this cycle took three meetings and each meeting had pre-listening, whilst-listening, and post-listening activity.

            Research implementation was the next stage in which the proposed solution to the problem found in pre-research was implemented. This stage was carried out to see if the problem could be overcome successfully. The focus of the research was students’ progress in listening ability that was undertaken through two cycles which consisted of some activities. In cycle 1 there were identifying the problems, planning the actions, implementing the actions, observing and monitoring the action, reflecting data and resulting of the observation, final reflection and the research findings.

C. Research Implementation

            After the students’ problems had been identified that textbook materials did not attract the students’ attention and increase their motivation, a solution was proposed as using cloze dictation in teaching and learning listening abilitys. The implemention of cloze dictation in teaching and learning of listening ability was conducted in two cycles where in each cycle there were certain actions to be taken. The teaching and learning process of listening comprehension as the treatment in the first cycle consisted of three meetings. Afer finishing the first cycle, students were given questionare as an evaluation on the application of cloze dictation and also the absence as well as the presence of other factors affecting success of the process in order that any problems that might arise could be identified. The second cycle consisted of three meetings. This cycle was carried out based on the evaluation of the implementation of the first cycle. Thus, basically, the second cycle was meant to overcome the problems that might still arise. The overall implementation of the research is summarized and can be seen in the following table.

Table 3 Overall Implementation of the Research

Problem                 Students had low listening comprehension and low learning interest and motivation

Solution                 Teaching listening comprehension using cloze dictation

Students                 First grade students of STKIP PGRI Ngawi

Number of cycle    2 cycles

Cycle 1                  Cloze dictation materials were selected by the lecturer mostly from internet and other sources

Planning                Discussing the result of pre-test of listening test  Giving cloze dictation materials from selecting material from English book and internet. Each meeting has stages: pre-listening, whilst listening, and post-listening

Action                   ·      Meeting 1      : To present fifteen cloze dictation sentences and two  cloze dictation texts: “Borobudur”, “Coconut”. ·      Meeting 2      : To present fifteen cloze dictation sentences and two cloze dictation  texts: “Guava”,“Indonesia Idol”. ·      Meeting 3      : To present fifteen cloze dictation sentences and two cloze dictation  text of  “Aloe vera” and “Raflesia Arnoldi” ·      Meeting 4      : Post-test 1

Observation ·      Students got more interested in the materials, but still lack of confidence in sharing ideas with other ·      Their understanding  toward the materials is better ·      More active especially in answering question ·      Fewer students talked about unrelated topic

Reflection  (+) ·         Students looked more stimulated and motivated in learning listening because they learned listening with various materials and activities. ·            Students were more serious in doing the tasks because they learned more functional materials. ·            There was an improvement of students’ learning motivation during the teaching and learning process. It was proven by the improvement of the post-tesr result in the cycle. ( - ) Students still needed more practice in listening to normal speed of oral text and build their vocabulary.

Post-test             The post-test was conducted

Cycle 2               Cloze dictation materials were selected by the lecturer mostly from internet and other sources.

Planning             Based on the weaknesses found in cycle 1, students were introduced with cloze dictation  again but different text. The vocabulary was discussed at pre-listening stage to make them more prepared with the main activities. To make students understand better with the content of a text spoken at normal speed, the recordings were played several times.

Action               ·      Meeting 1: To present both cloze dictation sentences and  texts: “Raflesia Arnoldi” and “Bandengan Beach” ·      Meeting 2: To present both cloze dictation sentences and  texts:”Papaya”,  “Razor” and “Epson”                    ·      Meeting 3: To present both cloze dictation senteces and  texts:  “Elephant“, and  “Cabbage” ·      Meeting 4: Post-test 2

Observation          Students were more active and more confident to participate in all activities in listening as discussion on vocabulary, answering questions, discriming sounds, and teaching and learning process was effective. The class more fun and alive.

Reflection ( + ) After being given cloze dictation with less difficult vocabulary of monologue text, students seemed to enjoy the lesson. They also took advantage of the text being played repeatdly. They learned pronunciation and enriched their listening ability. It was also obvious that their listening competence got better. Beside, with cloze dictation they could also learn listening independently. ( - ) Students still needed more practice in listening to normal speed of oral text and build their vocabulary.

Post-test                The post-test was conducted

Final Reflection    Students’ listening ability  improved significantly especially in answering comprehension questions. The students could predict and guess a word both sentence and text much better. The classroom situation became alive, students were more active, and they were more motivated to learn listening.

            The implementation of the research in each cycle is described in the following section:

            The first and second cycles used materials from functional texts book and other  materials selected by the lecturer. In these cycles focused in predicting and discriming sounds.

a. Description of Cycle 1

1) Planning the Action

            The action plan for the first cycle was based on the problems that were identified on the pre-research stage as follows: 1) students had low listening comprehension and 2) the lack of students’ reading and writing skills by exposing the student to the written form of the language as he listens to the spoken form; and students were poor to recognize sight words and to make associations of sounds with letters. To overcome those problems, the researcher decided to conduct a study by focusing on improving the students’ listening ability using cloze dictation. Before the action was implemented, the researcher prepared the materials, students’ worksheets, lesson plan as guidance in teaching listening, and anything related to the action were prepared. The researcher and the collaborator also plan what observe during the teaching and learning process in the classroom. The target includes students’ attention to the lesson, students’ participation in class activities, and students’ interest and motivation in learning the materials. To find the accurate data of classroom situation during the teaching and learning process, the collaborator was provided with instruments such as observation guide, field note sheet and other documents like lesson plan, students’ worksheet, and the tape script of the material. The following is the description of the steps of planning activities.

a).Sharing ideas with collaborators

            There were many things that the researcher shared with the collaborator. They were about designing the lesson plan that would be done by the researcher in the classroom, how to observe what happened in the classroom when cloze dictation materials were implemented in teaching listening, and how to correct and score students’ performance. In addition, the researcher asked suggestion for better practice for next meeting.

            Based on the result of sharing with the collaborators, there were many things that the researcher and the collaborators discussed with. First, the collaborator agreed that the researcher would like to implement what is so called cloze dictation into the classroom practice to improve students’ listening ability. The collaborator was also interested in it too. Therefore, the researcher was sure that they could share the concept and the strength of cloze dictation and how to apply them in teaching listening.

            Second, both collaborator and the researcher came to an agreement that there were two elements of listening to be scored covering predicting and discriming sounds. The mark of each student was gotten from the number of correct answer.

            Third, the collaborator reminded the researcher to observe some other points including students’ participation in class activities, students’ attention to the lesson, students’ attendance, and students’ response to the teaching and learning activities, willingness to ask and answer questions, and unexpected thing that occurred in the classroom.

b). Making Lesson Plan

            Lesson plan is a proposal for action in teaching activities. Thus, after determining the competence that would have to be achieved by students, the plans were made with the purpose that teaching learning process could be successful in bringing students to a positive change.

            Based on the goal of teaching, a series of components of lesson plan were set in such a way. This involved the goal itself, indicators, time allocation. Learning objectives, learning materials, learning method, media and sources of materials, extra- class work, and evaluation.

c). Preparing students’ work sheet

            The purpose of preparing work sheet is to provide students with appropriate ways of directing attention to the lesson, focusing students’ mind to the objectives of learning. With the students’ work sheet lecturer would also adapt the materials considering the students’ level of language and activities that were challenging to do.

d). Designing post-test

            Post-test was a means to asses students’ achievement after they had sufficient opportunities for learning. The result of the post-test was for assessing the success of the students and making adjustment in the lesson for the next day. Both researcher and collaborator came to agreement that the post-test was held at the end of each cycle covering two elements: predicting and discriming sounds.

2) Implementing the Action

            In the first cycle, the researcher presented sentences and functional texts. It was three meetings in the first cycle and each meeting consisted of three phases: pre-listening, whilst-listening, and post-listening activities. The text that should be shown to students was heard on headset. The implementation of Cycle 1 can be seen in the table below.

Table 4 Implementation of Cycle 1

Cycle 1 : using cloze dictation taken from many sources : functional texts,  internet

Planning Designing lesson plan Designing handout

Action From the first to third meeting the researcher presented different materials for each meeting. In  worksheet consist of cloze dictation task, discriminating sounds, identifying main idea, and listening for detailed information.

Observation      ·         Students looked more serious in paying attention to the lesson ·         Students did most of the listening activities ·         Students felt more comfortable and relax with the materials ·         Students seemed to be interested in the materials ·         Students looked more motivated in learning listening ·         Students’ comprehension in learning material improved

Reflection Cloze dictation attracted students’ attention Cloze dictation stimulated students’ motivation But Students still needed vocabulary building Students were unable to catch information spoken in fast speech easily Students needed more practice

Revised Plan Students were provided with vocabulary exercises at the beginning of the lesson with the help of the lecturer To make students more interested, the short texts were selected from descriptive text and other sources. To facilitate students to understand the content of text spoken at fast speed, students were given chance to listen repeatedly

Post-test The post-test was conducted to know students’ progress in listening ability.

a) First Meeting

(1) Warming Up and Presentation

            On Oct 5, 2010, the lesson started for about 90 minutes from 02.00 to 03.30 am at the first period in a language laboratory. The researcher went directly to close the lecturer desk in front of the class facing the students, while the collaborator took a seat in the corner of front class. The lesson began, the lecturer greeted students by saying “Good afternoon everybody!”, The students answered, “Good afternoon Miss!”, “How are you!” They answered, “Fine!”. Then, she checked the student’s attendance one by one. In the first meeting all students were present.

(2) Main Activity

            The researcher introduced the topic of the discussion. She told the students the objective of the meeting; that was implementing cloze dictation for improving their listening ability.  She asked them to focus in listening materials, describe the process of how to discriminate sounds in the text, identify main idea, and listen for detailed information based on the text. To warm them up, the researcher gave the cloze dictation tasks both in sentence and text. The lecturer told the students that she was going to play (or read) a passage and that she wanted them to listen, read along on their sheets, and wrote in the missing words. The lecturer plays the CD or reads the passage at normal speed with a pause after each sentence allowing the students to write in the missing words. The cloze dictation was given in the traditional style of reading the passage three times, the first time at a normal speaking speed with the students only listening to get the general meaning of the passage, the second time slowly enough for the students to write, presenting the passage in word groupings or “chunks”, the third time at normal speed, but allowing pauses between sentences to allow the students to fill in any words or to correct any errors they perceived from the second reading. The first meeting the lecturer gave fifteen cloze dictation sentences including the options (multiple choice and word randomly). The kinds of questions that were usually found in listening ability exercises are as follows:

1.        Discriminating sounds

The question is: fill in cloze dictation text and sentences below by choosing the option both in a box and multiple choices and decide which one would be the best answer based on each text.

2.        Identifying main idea in paragraph.

The questions used are:

a.                   What is the main idea of the paragraph?

b.    The second paragraph tells us ...

3.        Listening for detailed information.

The questions are:

a.                   Which one is not mentioned in the paragraph?

b.    Which of the following is correct?

Having finished explaining the kinds of questions, the next step, the lecturer distributed the worksheet to all students one by one and gave information how to finish the exercises. In the first task, the lecturer asked the students to discriminate sounds of the cloze dictation text. To answer the questions the students had to read the cloze dictation material including the option both in the box first, listen, pronunce the word, write every word in the blank by choosing the best option and find for groups of words and phrases at sentence level in the text by reading again. Second, the lecturer asked to the student to identify main idea and listen for detailed information for each text after they have finished to fill in cloze dictation. In answering both indicators, the students could read the text again and filter the answer after they had finished the first exercise (discriminating sounds), one of the students said, “Waduh, susah and bingung Miss antara mendengarkan dan mau menulisnya. Pasti ketinggalan terus! Diulang-ulang lagi aja Miss bacanya trus jangan lupa pelan-pelan saja.” And the other students said, “ ya bu susah ga terbiasa latihan dikte bahasa inggris soalnya”.

In order to understand what the students are reading from an English text, they also need to guess from the sentence. The students could guess by translating the words in the sentence and the options. To answer this indicator, the lecturer asked the students to pay attention and focus for each sentence when they fill in cloze dictation and choose the appropriate word based on the sentence that they heard

In the third task, the students had to identify main idea for each text, and listening detailed information based on the text. The lecturer asked Rizky, “What is the main idea of text 1?” she answered (b) and then the lecturer asked Fitri, “How about you?’ she answered (a). The lecturer said, “to identify main idea you have to read a sentence that told you the writer’s idea about the topic of each paragraph whether the sentence was in the first, middle, or in the last of paragraph. So please read the text carefully and translate them together. After that the researcher asked the student again, “have you found the answer? One student named Pandu answered,” (a) Miss because in the first sentence told about the idea that Borobudur is Hindu-Buddhist temple and it was built in the ninth century”. The other students said, “I agreed with Pandu Miss because I have the same reason”. Then the researcher said, that’s right you could give the right answer. So the best option was (a).” After that she continued to number 2 and asked, “What was the idea of the second paragraph?” the student named Antin answered, in second paragraph here told about the shape of temple and its construction so (b) was the answer. The other friends said, Tumben lancar mikirnya ha.ha”. To know the students opinion the researcher felt happy because there was interaction between the lecturer and students. She said, Yes Antin your answer right”.

In the next task, the students had to find detailed information in every paragraph. In this activity they did not find difficulty because they could find it by reading the text again. At last, the students had to guess the words by finding the synonym of “all over the world” based on the context in the first text. They could guess by translating the words and the options. Then the researcher continued to the next discussion in text 2. The discussion session here the students could think well. The researcher explained to them that the answers could be found either during reading or after reading the text. At last, the researcher reviewed the meeting by asking them what they knew during the meeting. Luckily, there was a student, namely Pandu, who raised his hand and said that he wanted to know more about the functional texts in cloze dictation.

            In the first meeting, the interaction between the students and the lecturer happened. It could be seen that students were enthusiastic in learning something new for them. They learn to spell words and pronounce word better athough most of them still had mistakes in discriminating sounds /too/ into /two/; /fare/ into / fair/; /sun/ into /son/, etc. It happened because they have less vocabularies and the were rarely practice to pronunce word. Moreover, the students could understand how to differentiate between homophone and each usage based on context. They enjoyed the lesson and increased their self-confidence to speak. Automatically, it built students critical thinking and familiarity with word usage and the manipulation of language to impact meaning. Students were very curious to look for main idea, detailed information, and discriminate sounds through discussion. Nevertheless, some students still need more exercises to get better understanding of the texts they had learned. The limited of time made the researcher wasn’t able to help all students in solving their problems during the learning process.

The discussion session here the students could think well. The researcher explained to them that the answers could be found either during reading or after reading the text. At last, the researcher reviewed the meeting by asking them what they knew during the meeting. Luckily, there was a student, namely Jeppy, who raised his hand and said that he wanted to know more about the functional texts in cloze dictation.

            In the first meeting, the interaction between the students and the lecturer happened. It could be seen that students were enthusiastic in learning something new for them. They learn to spell words and pronounce word better. They enjoyed the lesson and increased their self-confidence to speak. Automatically, it built students critical thinking and familiarity with word usage and the manipulation of language to impact meaning. Students were very curious to look for predicting and discriminating sounds word through discussion. Moreover, the students could understand how to differentiate between homophones, minimal pairs and each usage based on context. Nevertheless, some students still need more exercises to get better understanding of the texts they had learned. The limited of time made the researcher wasn’t able to help all students in solving their problems during the learning process.

            Based on the implementation of cloze dictation technique in the first meeting, the lecturer as researcher found out the students difficulties. They are  the speed of functional texts is too fast to listen so they had made spelling error on their written version of cloze dictation such  / summit into sumit /, /wide into with /etc. Although they could listen and read the questions  they also found difficulties to identify main idea and listen for detailed because they had limited vocabulary and background knowledge for each text and sentence.

(3) Closing

            In closing, the lecturer ended the class by saying goodbye. However, before ending the class, she reminded the students to study hard at home and reviewed the main points of the lesson. She gave a chance to those who did not understand the materials given to ask questions. She also asked the students’ feeling about the lesson they had just followed.

b) Second Meeting

(1) Warming Up and Presentation

            On Oct 19, 2010 the lesson started for about 90 minutes from 02.00 to 03.30 am at the first period in a language laboratory. The researcher went directly to close the lecturer desk in front of the class facing the students, while the collaborator took a seat in the corner of front class. The lesson began, the lecturer greeted students by saying “Good afternoon everybody!” The students answered, “Good afternoon Miss!”, “How are you!” They answered, “Fine!” Then, she checked the student’s attendance one by one. In the first meeting all students were present.

(2) Main Activity

      Like in the first meeting, in this step, the lecturer discussed the student’s result of the previous lesson and asked them the difficulty they had encountered. The students were led by the lecturer to discuss the materials for the next task. In the second meeting, the researcher gave fifteen cloze dictation sentences and two cloze dictation texts (Guava and Indonesian Idol). She distributed worksheet to the students related to the topic. In this stage, students still worked individually and the lecturer will give monologues with some parts of them conveyed by lecturer and CD. It took about 45 minutes. In discriminating sounds the students found difficulty in answering the questions because their background knowledge about the text “guava” was limited besides the options had the similar answer so they confused to choose which one was the best option. When the discussion session started the student named Adhey said, “Ya ampun, pilihannya buat bingung Miss semua hampir sama!”         In cloze dictation text the students showed the progress of their listening ability. They could differentiate the pronunciation between present and past even in their written version because they could read the text again and make better their grammar so only a few of them had spelling error in their written version. For example to pronunce and spell the word / eat/ and /ate/; /meet/ and /met/ besides they also could differentiate the phoneme based on the context  like /by/ and / buy/;/ hug/ and /hag/; /knew/ and /new/, /sore/ and /soar/, etc.

      In identifying main idea, (Indonesian Idol text), the students still find difficulties in the other hand they could listen for detailed information and they also showed the progress because the could find the answer by reading the text after they listened the CD.

            Based on students’ observation, learning listening through functional texts was interesting for them. Student SD who is categorized quite low in listening could say, “Lumayan bisa daripada yang pertemuan kemarin, hari ini sudah agak paham bagaimana cara mengerjakannya dan bisa agak konsentrasi antara mendengar dan menulis”. This positive response was also given by most students.

            In this meeting, the researcher saw that students were excited doing the activity although some of them got difficulty in identify main idea. Students were curious to learn pronunciation and spelling of words in different way they had ever done before.

(3) Closing

            Having finished all the activities on that day, then, the lecturer ended the class by saying thanks to the students for joining the class actively and attentively. She reviewed the main points of the lesson and hoped that the students could apply their English listening in their daily life. Finally, she said good bye for parting.

c) Third Meeting

(1) Warming Up and Presentation

            On Oct 26, 2010 in a language laboratory from 02.00 to 03.30 am. There were three steps which had been planned to do in the third meeting. They were opening, main activities, and closing. In the opening, the lecturer with her collaborator went into the class and greeted the students, checked the students’ attendance, reviewed the main points of the last lesson shortly and explained the activities that were going to be done in that meeting.

(2) Main Activity

            At first, the researcher reviewed the previous lessons by asking some questions to the students. Some students replied directly and some others just smiled. In this meeting, the researcher still gave fifteen cloze dictation sentence and two functional texts “aloe vera and Raflesia Arnoldi”. In this meeting, the lecturer was as the speaker. After that, the lecturer started to read the text loudly and clearly. The students had three times to listen the text and fill in the blank            in cloze dictation task. Then, the researcher gave the students time to answer the next questions and finding the answer based on the text in cloze dictation. After that, class discussion started. The researcher asked the students to answer the tasks one by one and made correction for each mistakes. The next step, the lecturer asked them to read the text and gave the meaning for each paragraph. When one told his opinion, the others gave addition. If students had different opinion with his friend, they gave feedback. In this activity, the students were actively involved in the whole discussion between the researcher and the students.

In discriminating sounds, the students seemed to be confused and felt difficult to guess the words based on the sentence because the words were rarely used and they were less vocabulary so, many students answered false in this aspect. Besides, in identifying main idea and listening for detailed, they could answer based on their background knowledge about aloe vera and raflessia and they were more confidence in choosing the option.

            In cloze dictation task, the students and the researcher discussed about the listening material that they have listened. Here, the researcher explained and gave the information that the students showed good progressing. There were many students could answer the problem well. They said that the listening material given was easy because they have known the technique to solve listening ability. Although there were few students couldn’t answer the problem well, but it didn’t show the weakness of the students. One of the students who was categorized low ability said that by discriminating sounds (filling in blank in cloze dictation text) he became more challenging in oral and written version although sometimes spelling error appear in his written version. And of course, the students who got bad score gave their promise to the researcher that they would do the next exercises better than before. 

            Having finished the activities, the researcher asked the students, “What do you think about this text? Did you still find any difficulties?” ” The students answered, “Yes, Quite difficult Miss because we found new vocabularies in this text but so far so good. It can improve our English better walaupun nulisnya masih ada kesalahan”. This activity in cloze dictation helped students to use words both in spoken and written version. Although some students got difficulties in following to read words, especially in pronouncing with a good intonation and punctuation but their motivation to learn was high. It could be seen from the student’s attentions and responses during the learning activities. It was also easier for the students to catch the main idea each paragraph. In addition, by memorizing words they had heard while doing listening, students would grow their brain, built mental discipline, and strengthen the spirit then they were able to read the text confidently.

(3) Closing

             Having finished all the activities on that day, then, the lecturer ended the class by saying thanks to the students for joining the class actively and attentively. She reviewed the main points of the lesson and hoped that the students could apply their English listening in their daily life. Finally, she said good bye for parting.

d) Fourth Meeting

            The evaluation was the fourth step in the action of cloze dictation which was done to know whether the students could increase their listening ability or not. It was carried out on November 2, 2010 and lasted for 90 minutes from 02.00 to 03.30 am. It was the same test applied in Pre-test. The test was done intentionally to measure students’ achievement before and after the treatment. It was done individually. It was attended by all students, the collaborator and the researcher herself.

            It seemed that all students were ready in their class waiting for the researcher coming to have the post-test of students’ listening ability. They all seemed to learn cloze dictation technique as well as the previous meeting.

c) Observing the Action

Observing is an important aspect in a classroom action research, because it can help the researcher gain a better understanding of the research, while at the same time define the students’ ability to observe, analyze, and interpret the material which can also be used to improve their competence.

Examining the impact of acting by observation and test it can be explained as follows:

1)        The technique gives students a new impression. The students can identify main idea by reading the text again after they heard the monologue.

2)        The class situation is rather noisy but controlled. They are active enough during the discussion.

3)    Some students are still difficult to discriminate sounds of new word and listen for detailed although the can read both sentence and text again.

4)        Some students do not pay attention to the lesson.

5)        On November 2, 2010 Post-test 1 was conducted. All thirty students could participate in Post-test 1, since the researcher informed it to them in the meeting before. The researcher could report the result of Post-test 1 scores. The average of the post-test 1 was 67.22. The highest score was 86.67 and the lowest score was 50.00. Then, the researcher analyzed the students’ scores based on the kinds of questions and the average of students answering them correctly. They could be seen in the table below:

Table 5 Kinds of Questions and the average of Students’ Score

Kinds of Questions	The average of Students’ Score
Discriminating sounds	64.07
Identifying main idea	77.50
Listening for detailed	69.17

In Post-test 1, 64.07 of the students could disciminate sounds. 77.50 of the students could identify main idea. 69.17 of students could listen for detailed information. (See more detail information in appendix 17 p. 159 ).

d) Reflecting the Observation Result

            In this reflection the researcher analyzed what had happened in Cycle 1. The result was then used as the basis for arranging the general plan in the second cycle. The organization of the report in the reflection included: (1) the result, (2) the strengths, (3) the weaknesses, and (4) revising the plan

1)      The result

The pretest and the post-test of cycle 1 given to the students showed the improvement of students’ listening ability. The average of pre-test is 61.11 and the average of post-test 1 is 67.22. The researcher also gave analysis to the students’ listening ability in each aspect. The number of item of discriming sounds aspect is 18 items; the students’ average in answering the question of pre-test is 59.63 and of post-test 1 is 64.07. The number of item of identifying main idea aspect is 4 items; the students’ average in answering the identifying main idea questions of pre-test is 66.67 and of post-test 1 is 77.50The number item of listening for detailed information aspect is 8 items, the students’ average in answering the question of pre-test is 61.67 and of post-test 69.17. (see appendix 17 p.158).

From the average scores of two inter-raters, the researcher could report that the progress score of pre-test and post test in cycle 1 was 6.11%. It can be concluded that their listening abilitys were better than before. It meant that the students’ achievement improved. In summary, it could be shown in the following table:

Table 6

The Average Scores of the Pre-Test and the Post-Test in cycle 1

POINTS	STUDENTS’ SCORE
	PRE-TEST	POST-TEST
Lowest Highest Mean	30.00 83.33 61.11	50.00 86.67 67.22

            At the end of cycle 1, the researcher gave questionnaires to the students to find out the students’ responses to the implication of Cloze Dictation. The result of the questionnaire can be seen in the table below.

Table 7 Students’ Responses to the Action

Questions	Students’ Response
	Yes	No
1.      Do you agree with learning listening ability through Cloze Dictation?	100%	0%
2.      Is there Improvement in your listening ability?	100%	0%
3.      Are you motivated to learn listening ability using Cloze Dictation?	100%	0%
4.      Do you feel any burden in learning listening ability through Cloze Dictation?	0%	100%
5.      Should we continue applying Cloze Dictation in the future?	100%	0%

            The description of the table above was explained in the following section: One hundred percent of students agree with learning listening through Cloze Dictation. The reasons are Cloze Dictation is interesting and challenging; Cloze Dictation can facilitate them in learning listening. Cloze dictation is also motivating. The activities encourage the students do the oral form carefully. The students are curious about activities so they want to learn and learn. Cloze dictation also improves their vocabularies, spelling and pronunciation.

2) The strengths

a) Using cloze dictation both sentence and text attracted students’ attention to the material.

b) The students’ listening ability  improved. It was proven by the increasing score in indicator of identifying main idea  in students’ post-test result in Cycle 1.

c) There was also improvement in students’ learning motivation during the teaching and learning process. The students paid attention to the lesson and participated in all listening activities.

3) Weaknesses

a) When making summary of the text, students still felt difficult to sum the content of the text because they did not know how to discriminate sounds and listen for detailed information.

b) Some students still find difficulty in written version when the text was spoken very fast.

c) Functional text that used to teach listening contains a lot of difficult vocabularies which were not frequently used.

4) Revising the Plan

      To overcome the problems aroused in cycle 1, the researcher revised the plan that would be implemented in the next cycle, so that the problems would not occur anymore. The plan for the next cycle would be more focused on improving students’ listening ability, designing simpler task, and played the CD repeatedly to accomodate all students’ level.

b. Description of Cycle 2

1) Planning the Action

            The action plan for cycle 2 was arranged after reflecting the observation results in cycle 1 in which the researcher found the weaknesses of cycle 1. Just like planning the action for cycle 1, there were some things that were done in planning the action for cycle 2 such as sharing ideas with collaborator, making lesson plan, preparing handout or worksheet, etc.

            To overcome the weaknesses of cycle 1 the researcher revised the plan as folows: (1) using cloze dictation material from functional texts by giving short monologue and easy understanding to the students (2) choose the monologue which has medium speed. The researcher prepared monologue text in cycle 2, It was still descriptive. Students’ handout and exercises were made with vocabulary exercises preceded the main activities and the lesson plan as guidance in teaching was modified in such a way for eliminating the existing problems. For the better result of the next implementation, everything was already based on the discussion between the researcher and the collaborator. The post-test was decided to held after the second meeting as a means of measuring students’ achievement.

2) Implementing the Action

            The aim of this action is to overcome the problems from cycle 1, where students still found difficult in spelling sound discrimination and listening for detailed because of limited  vocabulary and fast delivery.

            The action was implemented in second cycle in which the researcher made a careful selection to choose more suitable materials for students. As students failed with texts because of difficult vocabulary and spoken very fast, the researcher chose different topic which were interesting, practical, within students’ level, and meaningful for students. Thus, the researcher gave students simple text.

            In this cycle there were three meetings and each meeting was divided into three terms namely pre-listening, whilst-listening, and post-listening activity as in the following table.

Table 8 Implementation of Cycle 2

Cycle 1 : using cloze dictation taken from functional texts and other sources from internet

Planning Designing lesson plan Designing handout

Action First Meeting       :  Presenting fifteen cloze dictation sentences and  the cloze dictationl text: “Bandengan Beach” which is read by the speaker. Second Meeting : Presenting fifteen cloze dictation sentences and three cloze dictation texts: “Papaya, Razor” and “Epson” Third Meeting   : Presenting thirteen cloze dictation sentences and two cloze dictation texts: “Elephant and Cabbage” Fourh Meeting      : Post-test 2

Observation      ·         Students looked more serious in paying attention to the lesson ·         Students did most of the listening ability  activities ·         Students felt more comfortable and relax with the materials ·         Students seemed to be interested in the materials ·         Students looked more motivated in learning listening ·         Students’ comprehension in learning material improved

Reflection Students looked more confident in their learning participation. They were more ready to answer question during questions and answers session. Students’ interest is increasing a lot in the chosen the topic. Vocabulary building through discriminating sounds encouraged students participation. Students listening ability  improved shown by checking their answers in exercises.

Closing The class action research was completed in cycle 2 but the use of cloze dictation will be continued to the next teaching learning process and students are encouraged to listen to TV, radio, internet, CD, watch film, or even listen to anybody listening English.

Post-test The post-test was conducted.

b) First Meeting

(1) Opening

            On November 9, 2010 as usual the researcher prepared everything before students entered the room. The lesson began at 2 a.m in language laboratory. Before checking the students’ attendance she greeted the students and asked if they had tried to practice listening at home. She asked what difficulty they generally encountered in listening activity. They answered, “speed tapi lama-lama kami bisa memahami dan mendapat hasil yang cukup maksimal”.

(2) Main Activity

            She began the lesson by giving students a chance to listen cloze dictation text “Papaya and Bandengan Beach” and discriminate sounds for each text in language laboratory. In this section, the lecturer was as the speaker. Students were given the first task that was discriminating sounds which was read by the lecturer. Then, she started to read the sentence and text loudly and clearly. In this stage, students worked individually. It took about 20 minutes.

After they filling in the cloze dictation, the lecturer heard two of the students said, ”Jika bu Tere yang baca enak jelas dan kita pasti bisa nulisnya ya? Daripada speaker nya native susah” To know the students responses she asked to them, Have you OK?” They said, Of course Miss karena lebih jelas pronunciation nya”. Then, when they discuss the cloze dictation task most of the students could be able to do oral and written version in good spelling. Only a few of them still less to listen and did not focus to the speaker.

In identifying main idea and listening for detailed information they could answer the tasks well because the text have familiar vocabulary so the students easy to understand the text given. Besides they also could read the text again after they listened and filled in cloze dictation in the first part so they could filter the answer based on the text.

Based on students’ observation, learning listening through cloze dictationl text is interesting for them. One of student who is categorized medium in listening could say, “Agak bisa mengerjakan karena vocabulary nya mudah dipahami selain itu saya bisa mencari jawabannya dengan membaca teks lagi”. This positive response was also given by most students.

 In discriminating sounds, the students have many mistakes in answering the questions because of less vocabulary and the options were similar. Besides, the students also found difficulty because the speed was too fast so they felt confused to choose the best among them. Because of the reason the lecturer wanted to discuss that problem together.

(3) Closing

             Having finished all the activities on that day, then, the lecturer ended the class by saying thanks to the students for joining the class actively and attentively. She reviewed the main points of the lesson and hoped that the students could apply their English listening in their daily life. Finally, she said good bye for parting.

b) Second Meeting

 (1) Opening

            On November 16, 2010 at 2 a.m the researcher started the lesson by greeting the students and then checking students’ attendance. Then, she told them “Today we are going to do listening through cloze dictation of functional texts “Papaya, Razor” and “Epson” so please listen carefully and catch the words you heard.

(2) Main Activity

            In this section, students could practice vocabulary and extract meaning from the content of the text. The next activity  that should be done in this phase was answering and discussing some questions together.

 In Cloze dictation task of discriminating sounds, identifying main idea, and listening for detailed, the students listened both CD and the lecturer’s,  in this section they also showed the progress. In the previous meeting they preferred the lecturer’ voice than native’s. In this meeting, although the speaker was native the students could listen and fill in cloze dictation well and only a few of them thought that the speed was too fast and the voice was not clear. In the previous meeting they preferred the lecturer’ voice than native’s. In this meeting, although the speaker was native the students could listen and discriminate sounds well and only a few of them thought that the speed was too fast and the voice was not clear.

            In identifying main idea, the students could face the problem well by reading and filtering the writer’s idea in the text besides the vocabulary was easy to understand by them. A male student named Jeppi stated, “Materinya lumayan gampang bu, karena vocab di dalam teks cukup familiar jadi bisa lebih menguasai materi”.

            In listening for detailed information, the students felt the difficulties in filtering the answer because they found the similar options in their worksheet and because of limited time they could not read in a long time. So, the researcher gave a chance to students who could answer the problem. A few of them gave response and tried to answer by using his/her own idea based on the text. Then, the lesson ran smoothly until the discussion was over. In this learning process, both listening and speaking and perhaps other language skill and component were interesting, motivating, and even entertaining.

The lesson ran smoothly until the discussion was over. In this learning process, both listening and speaking and perhaps other language skill and component were interesting, motivating, and even entertaining.

(3) Closing

             Having finished all the activities on that day, then, the lecturer ended the class by saying thanks to the students for joining the class actively and attentively. She reviewed the main points of the lesson and hoped that the students could apply their English listening in their daily life. Finally, she said good bye for parting.

c) Third Meeting

(1) Opening

            The meeting was carried out on November 23, 2010    from 02.00 to 03.30 am. She entered the class with her collaborator and greeted the students,”Good afternoon students” and they answered in high spirit. “Good afternoon Miss!” She asked their condition and checked the students’ attendance. She explained that today she would give the descriptive of the functional text “Elephant and Cabbage”. In this section, the lecturer was as the speaker.

(2) Main Activity

               In this section the students had to fill in the cloze dictation based on the monologue and answer the worksheet of discriminating sounds, identifying main idea and listening for detailed.

               In discriminating sounds through cloze dictation, the students felt difficult to choose the options because their background knowledge was limited. Most of their answers were false. To know unsatisfying answer the researcher asked to them, “What make you difficult to choose in this task?” they answered, “Bingung Miss” then the researcher discuss and explain it together.

               In discriminating sounds, the students found difficult to fill in the blanks because a several of the words were rarely used so it made the students have the mistakes in spelling error.

               In identifying main idea, listening for detailed information, the students had to be understood about the content of the text. So, they could answer the questions well by reading the text again and filtering the answer based on the context after they answered the cloze dictation task.

               The meeting was alive. All students took parts in the program and they felt it easier to listen and understand the text.

(3) Closing

                         Having finished all the activities on that day, then, the lecturer ended the class by saying thanks to the students for joining the class actively and attentively. She reviewed the main points of the lesson and hoped that the students could apply their English listening in their daily life. Finally, she said good bye for parting.

d) Fourth Meeting

            After implementation of cycle 2, the post test was conducted on Tuesday,

November 30, 2010. The post-test 2 was done intentionally to measure and to know students’ achievement before and after the treatment.

c) Observing the Action

            In conducting this action research, the researcher and the collaborative lecturer observed the situation, facts, the students’ progress and their respond toward the technique by interview and test.  It can be explained as follows:

1)        Students can discriminate sounds well based on their background knowledge in real condition about the topic given.

2)        Some students can identify main idea and listen for detailed for each text by reading the text again after they fill in the blank.

3)        Students follow the teaching learning process enthusiastically. They like the material of that day because the material in listening class is more challenging and they had never done before.

4)        The class discussion is very interesting however, there were a fewer students still passive. Although there are some different opinions, they can conclude them together and find the appropriate answer. They give comment enthusiastically however they cannot give opinion totally in English.

5)        Thirty students could participate in post-test 2 conducted on November 30, 2010, for the researcher informed them about post-test 2 in the last meeting. Their comprehension in post-test 2 was better. The researcher could report the result of Post-test 2 scores. The average of the post-test 2 was 75.00. The highest score was 96.67 and the lowest score was 63.33. Then, the researcher analyzed the students’ scores based on the kinds of questions and the average of students answering them correctly. They could be seen in the table below:

Table 9

 Kinds of Questions and the average of Students’ Score of Cycle 2

Kinds of Questions	The average of Students’ Score
Discriminating sounds	73.15
Identifying main idea	73.33
Listening for detailed information	88.33

In Post-test 2, 73.15 of the students could discriminate sounds. 73.33 of students could identify main idea. 88.33 of the students could listen for detailed information (see appendix 24 p.181).

d. Reflecting the Observation Results

In this reflection the researcher analyzed what had happened in Cycle 2. The result was then used as the basis for arranging the general plan in the second cycle. The organization of the report in the reflection included: (1) the result, (2) the strengths, (3) the weaknesses, (4) final reflection.

1)   The result

            From the cycle two, it could be concluded that using cloze dictation technique was effective to improve the students’ listening ability. It could be seen in the comparison between post-test cycle 1 and post-test of cycle 2. The students’ average of the post-test cycle 1 was 67.22 and the students’ average of post-test cycle 2 was 75.00. So, the students’ progress in discriminating sounds was 9.08%. The students’ progress in listening for detailed information was 19.16% and in identifying main idea the students had decreased the score 4.17%  but it still up to the KKM.  It could also be seen from the comparison of each aspect between post-test cycle 1 and post-test cycle 2.

Table 10

THE COMPUTATION OF THE RESULT SCORE PER CYCLE

NO	PRE-TEST	POST TEST CYCLE 1	POST TEST CYCLE  2
1.	83.33	73.33	83,33
2.	83.33	80.00	80.00
3.	56.67	56.67	63.33
4.	63.33	63.33	73.33
5.	30.00	70.00	86.67
6.	43.33	60.00	73.33
7.	56.67	60.00	76.67
8.	63.33	86.67	96.67
9.	76.67	73.33	80.00
10.	80.00	76.67	86.67
11.	60.00	60.00	76.67
12.	63.33	63.33	76.67
13.	76.67	60.00	76.67
14.	63.33	70.00	73.33
15.	40.00	50.00	63.33
16.	76.67	70.00	73.33
17.	56.67	63.33	73.33
18.	66.67	66.67	80.00
19.	66.67	60.00	63.33
20.	50.00	63.33	63.33
21.	46.67	66.67	66.67
22.	60.00	63.33	66.67
23.	60.00	56.67	70.00
24.	43.33	76.67	80.00
25.	66.67	60.00	66.67
26.	70.00	73.33	76.67
27.	66.67	83.33	83.33
28.	53.33	73.33	80.00
29.	50.00	73.33	76.67
30.	60.00	63.33	63.33
Mean	61.11	67.22	75.00

2)      The strength

Cloze dictation could be used to improve students’ listening ability significantly. It was proven by the increasing score in all indicators (discriminating sounds, identifying main idea, listening for detailed information) in students’ post-test result in Cycle 1. The selection of cloze dictation text made them easy to learn descriptive text. They were more attentive with the selected material.

They had more challenging to catch the words and share their ideas in class activity.

3)      The Weaknesses

Although cloze dictation was new for them, many students only needed longer time to listen, pay attention, focus, memorize, and write down the words (listening ability). In here, there were not weaknesses because the students’ score in all indicators were increased maximally.

4)      Final Reflection

Having implemented the research in two cycles, the researcher and the collaborator discussed the final reflection. Students’ listening ability was improved. The improvement could be recognized from the result of the comparison between the Pre-test scores, Post-test scores cycle 1, and Post-test scores of cycle 2.

From the explanation above, the researcher concluded that cloze dictation could be used to improve students’ listening ability.

Table 11

The Students’ Achievement in Listening ability

Source of Data	The Beginning of Cycle 1	The End of Cycle 1	The End of Cycle 2
Observation and interview	1. Listening Ability Implementing Cloze Dictation. a.     Discriminating sounds: The students’ memorizing, pronunciation and spelling ability were low. It was difficult for the students to memorize the word they heard and wrote down in the blank. Some students also still made spelling error which had double consonants, word which have the same or almost the same sounds and they also difficult to differentiate the usage of present tense or past tense. b.      Identifying main idea: The students never learned about identifying main idea. They felt difficult to       found in which line of each paragraph that content main idea because of lack understanding in every text besides if they could fill in the missing word in cloze dictation task they felt more difficult to found main idea. c.     Listening for detailed information: The students felt difficult to find detail information for each text because they never read English functional text and lack vocabulary.	1.     Listening Ability Implementing Cloze Dictation. a.       Discriminating sounds: The students could memorize the word by focusing to the text, spelt words better, and improved their pronunciation skill. The students could increase their pronunciation and spelling aspect during the implementation of the research. The students were able to differentiate between present and past tense but they’re still need more exercises. b.        Identifying main idea: Students’ ability in deciding meaning increased, students got more vocabulary  words from learning words based on the context. c.     Listening for detailed information: Students became more familiar with usage but they still needed to review the material. The students got knowledge in using words which had multiple meanings.	1.     Listening Ability Implementing Cloze Dictation. a.    Discriminating sounds The students showed a significant improvement in their memorizing the word by focusing to the text, spelling ability, pronunciation could be faced by them in better way and easier to differentiate between present and past tense. b.     Identifying main idea: Students got large vocabulary, they understood to find main idea for each paragraph in new texts. The students learned naturally to be more familiar with the functional texts. c.     Listening for detailed information: Students got better knowledge and understood about the content of the text.
Test Observation Interview, test	1.    Teaching Learning  Process a.      The students enjoyed in filling the missing word of cloze dictation before doing the exercises. b.      Students were interested with the new technique and involved in the activity. c.      Students seemed to be curious when they were introduced with cloze dictation. d.      Students learned to be more confident to listen. e.     Because of the limited time, not all of the students had chance to give their opinion. The Mean of the Pre-Test: 61.11. The Problem to solve: a.   The low ability of students’ memorizing, spelling and pronunciation. b.   The lack of knowledge on reading functional texts. c.   The students’ difficulty in understanding text. d.   The lack of vocabulary exercises. e.   The limited time to explain and discuss the material. f.    Keeping students’ focus on learning activity.	2.Teaching Learning Process a.  Students were interested with the new ways in cloze dictation instruction. b.  Students were active in class. c.   Students increased to be curious to learn more. d.  Students to be serious in paying attention through functional texts. e.   Cloze Dictation helped students to got better knowledge of spelling. The Mean of the Post-Test: 67.22. The Weaknesses: a.  Although the students were interested in the new way on understanding the text, it was difficult for the students to follow the new techniques they had never done. b.  The students often made mistake in catching the homophone word. c.   The limited time made the cloze dictation instruction couldn’t be fully understood by all students. d.  Some students made mistakes in memorizing words in their writing	2.Teaching Learning Process a. The students have opportunity to give opinion freely without correction directly, so the students spoke confidently in delivering their speech in discussion. b. The cloze dictation instruction encouraged students to be engaged in the learning process. c. The atmosphere in the listening class made students glad and learn better. d. Cloze dictation was effective to check the spelling ability and at the same time was effective to teach the correct spelling. The Mean of the Post-Test: 75.00. The Remaining Problems: a.       The limited time in delivering cloze dictation instruction and discussing session. b.       The new ways which were used in every meeting to avoid students’ boredom needed to be reviewed in further meeting.

D. Research Findings and Discussion

1. Findings

Based on the result of the research, the researcher found three findings to answer the problem of the research, which are 1) Can the technique of using cloze dictation improve the students’ listening ability? 2) What are the strengths and weaknesses using cloze dictation in the students’ listening ability? 3) What happens to the class situation if cloze dictation technique is used to improve students’ listening ability?.

 Besides focusing on answering the problems of the research as stated in chapter 1, the researcher also provides the implementation of the action research in this study. The discussion of the research findings is presented in the following section.

a.         Improvement of Students’ Listening ability

The findings of the study showed that the use of Cloze Dictation in the listening class improved students’ listening ability. The improvement of the students’ listening could be recognized from the improvement of listening achievement, the ability to answer the lecturer’s questions, and the ability to express ideas using appropriate vocabulary.

Before the study, she found that the students had low listening achievement. The improvement of the forms could be seen from the improvement of students’ achievement cycle to cycle. The listening achievement was increased significantly. It can be seen from the mean score of the pre-test, 61.11, the mean score of cycle 1, 67.22, the mean score of cycle 2, 75.00.  It meant that the students’ achievement increased significantly. The mean of post-test in the second cycle was better than that of the pre-test, and of the post-test in the first cycle. In summary, it could be shown in the following table:

Table 12 The Result of each Test in Every Cycle

POINTS	THE SCORE TEST
	PRE-TEST	CYCLE 1	CYCLE 2
Lowest	30.00	50.00	63.33
Highest	83.33	86.67	96.67
Mean	61.11	67.22	75.00

            Before the research, the students often gave improper answer to the lecturer’ questions. They seemed doubtful to give responses. It was caused by either they did not understand the lecturer’ questions or they did not know how to answer the questions for their lack vocabulary. After the implementation of Cloze Dictation, the atmosphere changed. Students could answer the lecture’ questions using their own opinion. The improvement of listening ability for each indicator in two cycles could be seen in the table below:

Table 13

The Improvement of Listening Ability for each Indicator in Two Cycles

Kinds of Questions	The Average of Students’ Score in Post-Test 1 Cycle 1	The Average of Students’ Score in Post-Test 2 Cycle 2
Discriminating sounds	64.07	73.15
Identifying Main Idea	77.50	73.33
Listening for detailed	69.17	88.33

Another finding of the research showed that there was an improvement of the students’ method to express ideas. After the implementation of Cloze Dictation, the students could express their knowledge to solve the problems in the exercises.

b.   Improvement of Class Situation

The findings of teaching and learning process showed that there was a change of class situation before and after Cloze Dictation was implemented in listening ability. The teaching and learning process using Cloze Dictation was more alive. The material in the students’ life was more interesting for them so that they felt more motivated to do the exercises. The activity was conducted individually.

Students showed high participations in listening class. They were eager to conduct the tasks with high spirit. They were not afraid of making mistakes in sharing their ideas because the class was far away of humiliating the students and tolerating the students with various level of ability. The lecturer was appreciated all of the students’ effort in listening. The listening class was full of enjoyment and coloured with students’ laugh. It showed the eagerness of the students in learning listening in relax atmosphere.

The students could get more skill from the implementation of Cloze Dictation in listening ability.

c.    Improvement of the lecturer

            As a lecturer, she improved herself in many points. First, she was better than before in designing and developing teaching material, such as in preparing worksheet that were suitable with the teaching purpose. Second, she became more familiar with her students. She noticed her students’ potencies and problems in listening. Therefore, she could find a suitable way of teaching listening to her students. Lastly, she appreciated her students better than before the implementation of Cloze Dictation. She also realized that the students need various activities to motivate them and got their attention during the learning process. She needed to be more creative in creating media to support her teaching and give opportunity to the students to express their ideas in order to give their need of self-esteem.

d. Recommendation

            The researcher, collaborator, and classroom lecturer discussed the revised plan as the reference for other researcher to consider in handling action research in further time. The revised plans were to give the students more exercise, conduct more various and interesting activities.

            The researcher should concern the rules and steps in teaching listening through cloze dictation carefully to keep student’s attention and to help students learn maximally.

2.   The Strengths and Weaknesses

The Strengths

There was some strength in applying the Cloze Dictation in cycle 1 and cycle 2 as follows: (1) Cloze dictation was collaboration. It can make the students focus on both accuracy as well as meaning; can develop all four skills listening, reading, speaking, writing can be developed if the students do the dictating rather than the lecturer; give the students opportunity to notice features of pronouncing such as weak form, linking and elision. Cloze dictation has the advantage of forcing students to show how much they know about a specific topic (grammar, vocabulary, listening comprehension etc.), (2) The students were the subject of this research, so they do everything in finishing it. The researcher and the collaborator are only their facilitator who facilitates them with their need, (3) Cloze dictation was motivating. The students became more motivate because they had done the tasks and they struggled to do the best.

The weaknesses

The application of Cloze Dictation in cycle 1 and cycle 2 had weaknesses as follows:  (1) Traditional cloze dictation is not a great oral comprehension exercise since it has little to do with authentic communication, (2) Cloze Dictation do not help students to understand the difference between the oral and the written language. Furthermore they are read at a slower pace than people speak normally and is therefore of little value to help students understand the language spoken by natives (3) Writing respecting the relation between sounds and letters is next to impossible if the student did not understand and guessing does not always work. There is a great deal of emphasis put on spelling mistakes in a dictation yet there is very little work done to help the students to perceive the basic sound-spelling correspondences revealed by their dictation errors.

3.      Discussion

The research which applied action research to improve students’ listening ability through Cloze Dictation brought satisfying results both in terms of the improvement of students’ listening ability and the classroom atmosphere. The researcher will discuss the findings which can be summarized into some points as follows: (1) Cloze Dictation can improve students’ listening ability; (2) Cloze Dictation has strengths and weaknesses in teaching learning process; (3) Cloze Dictation can motivate the students’ participation in listening class.  The action has been implemented in two cycles. Based on the reflection of each cycle, a number of implied values could be concluded as follows:

1.      The Improvement of Listening Ability

            In the first cycle, the students spelt and pronounced words better than before implementing of the research. They were enthusiastic in learning something new for them. In this case, the researcher gave explanation how to do the cloze dictation tasks to the students so, they could answer the questions before starting to listen the functional texts. The researcher was helping students feel competent and believe in their ability. This means that it is essential to move away from a product-orientated (answers to questions) approach. She also helped the students how to discriminate sounds, identify main idea and listen for detailed information based on the text.        In this cycle, the students also improve their vocabulary and have better understanding in functional texts by both listening and reading text. The researcher asked the students to do the task individually. Then, she gave out the students’ worksheet. Next, she asked students to answer the questions. For the first time, the researcher gave the students two minutes time to predict the picture. After that, she asked them to do the next task that was cloze dictation. In this session, the researcher gave texts which some part of them conveyed by her and CD. In cloze dictation, students had to pay attention, focus, and fill in the blanks in written version while they listened the text. In this activity, students seemed to be interesting during the activities. They enjoyed the lesson, increased their vocabulary, and improve their ability in catching the word.

            The students were curious to learn cloze dictation and how to discriminate sounds, and find main idea, detailed information that had never done before. By listening the functional texts to solve cloze dictation, the students not only improve their ability to listen but also got knowledge about the new texts easier. Nation and Newton (2009) considered cloze dictation (Partial Dictation) as an easier variant of full dictation and a plausible activity in enhancing FL/L2 listening ability. Students are provided with an incomplete written text and fill in missing words while listening to an oral version of the text.

            In this cycle, the students’ ability in all aspects improved. Students got more vocabulary from learning words based on the context. Students were able to understand the texts given because in every meeting, the researcher gave various texts so, they were more challenging to finish cloze dictation and could be fun to

improve their listening ability and its aspects. Lightfoot (2004: 4) said that dictation exercises are very important, particularly for developing the children’s awareness of phonic sound, and contrary to the popular view of dictation, it can be a lot of fun.

            Although many improvements were found in the first cycle, there were some weaknesses. The students felt that the speed of texts that they listened were so fast it happened because the never practiced on dictation. The students often made spelling error for example the word supported into support it. It was because the students is not used to the stress and intonation pattern of English and they way these influence both the realization of certain phonemes and the meaning of the utterance. Some students were confused to discriminate sounds. It happened because of limited vocabulary and understood to the context. The limited time made the listening ability couldn’t be fully understood by all students. Because of some weaknesses found in this cycle, the cycle 2 was needed to solve the problem.

            In cycle 2, the students’ ability in discriminating sounds and listening detailed information improved through cloze dictation. Although they missed to catch the word in blanks, they could think what would write after they listened. The students were able to discriminate sounds and they found detailed information only based on reading the text in cloze dictation. This technique is extremely useful for testing both reading and listening ability.

            The students’ ability in identifying main idea also improved although the students had limited vocabulary and faced newer, longer texts and rarely used than before they felt difficult to understand the text it self. Alderson’s (1978a) established that more difficult texts were better measures of the lower order skills which cloze procedure, than were easy texts.

2. The Most Significant Improvement of the Students’ Listening Ability

The most significant improvement of the students’ cloze dictation is listening for detailed information. Before implementation cloze dictation, the students were difficult to explore, filter their ideas based on text. After implementing cloze dictation in their learning activity, the students got larger vocabulary, and had understood about discriminate sounds, identify main idea based on the text specifically. It could be seen from the progress of post-test 1 and post-test 2 of the students. The students’ progress in discriminating sounds was 9.08%, the students’ average in identifying main idea had decreased 4.17% but it still up to KKM, the students’ progress in listening for detailed information was 19.16%. So, the most significant improvement was listening for detailed information aspect.

3. The Improvement of Class Situation

Cloze dictation makes the class more alive by the application of various activities during the teaching and learning process. Activities such as discriminating sounds, listening cloze dictation texts, identifying main idea, listening for detailed information are interesting and, therefore, motivating the students to use the language.

To support the teaching learning process, the students’ activities were guided by worksheet and the use of visual media. The visual media applied in the research was in the form of picture.  By this media, the students understood in understanding functional texts and delivering their words in written version.

The research findings reveal that Cloze Dictation can improve the students’ participation in the listening class. Before the research, the students showed low participation in listening class. They tried to avoid the listening class. They claimed that they could not listen English. Instead of taking listening discussion, they did not show their enthusiasm in conducting the listening activities.

The situation changed after the implementation of Cloze Dictation. The students showed high participation in listening class. During the research, students were enthusiastic in listening functional texts of cloze dictation. The improvement of students’ participation achieved because cloze dictation was interesting and, therefore, it was motivating. Cloze dictation can improve students’ motivation because it was challenging and could help develop all four language skills in an integrative way (http://exchanges.state.gov/education/engteaching/dictatn.htm).