The Fishbowl Strategy: An Effective Way to Improve Students’ Speaking Ability

Abstract

Speaking is one of essential language skills in communication. Language teachers are expected
to bring an effective method in classroom to improve students’ speaking skills. Based on the preliminary
study in language classroom SMAN 12 Medan, teachers had limited knowledge of creative method in
teaching speaking which can be integrated to curriculum. Thus, the use of Fishbowl strategy can provide
opportunity in the form of Fish and the Bowl for each student to practice speaking in the classroom while
considering about current curriculum. In the Fishbowl, each student can take a turn to deliver the ideas,
and everyone has the equal chance to speak. This research focused on the implementation of Fishbowl
strategy to improve speaking ability of 30 students from first grade of SMAN 12 Medan. The research
methodology was a classroom action research. At the end of implementing fishbowl, the researcher gave
the questionnaire to know students’ perception toward the use of Fishbowl strategy. Based on the research
findings, there were 26,6% successful students at the pre-test. After conducting fishbowl, 100% of
students in the classroom had improvement in their speaking skill because each of them had more chance
to speak up something related to the topic given