Improving Students’ English Speaking Skills Through Storytelling Technique

In learning English, the students must master the four basic skills, namely listening, speaking, reading, and writing. Speaking is one of the first skills that English students wish to acquire considering its crucial role. Speaking is often considered difficult for EFL learners to master because students have to acquire other language components such as grammar, vocabulary, pronunciation, and fluency to be proficient English speakers. Using storytelling techniques can be a potential strategy for teaching English speaking skills. The storytelling technique is a technique that helps improve students' skills in terms of enriching vocabulary, improving creativity, improving pronunciation, and organizing ideas. This research aims to find out whether the use of storytelling techniques can help improve the English speaking skills of a private Islamic boarding school’s students in Aceh. This quantitative study, with a pre-experimental research design. The total sample was 24 students. The data was obtained by using tests (a pre-test and a post-test), while the data was analyzed using a T-test, and the data obtained from the pretest and posttest were analyzed through the SPSS 20.0 software. This research study reveals students' speaking achievement improved by an increase in the mean score in the experimental class. A mean score of 64. 58 was recorded in the pre-test and a mean score of 82.29 was recorded in the post-test. Overall, the result of this study shows a significant difference between pre-test and post-test because Tcount > Ttable (24.063 > 2.068). Therefore, it can be concluded that teaching by the use of storytelling techniques can help improve the students’ skills in speaking.