The Application of Information Gap Activity to Improve Speaking Skill of Nursing Students

Nowadays, Speaking as one of four skills taught in English become popular and very important to be learned. Since 4.0 revolution era has been launched, the students from junior high school to university level are interested to study English especially speaking skill. The study aimed to investigate the significant difference in speaking achievement before and after the students were taught using Information Gap Activity. The pre-experimental design through one group pretest-posttest design was used in this study. The 4th semester students of S1 Nursing Science program at STIK Siti Khadijah Palembang in academic year 2019/2020 was the population of this study. The sample of this study was all of the population of this study. Since the total number of the population was 22 students, they all selected as the sample in this study. The test was administered twice as pretest and posttest. The result of the test was analyzed by using t-test through SPSS (Statistical Package for Social Science).


Introduction
Speaking is one of communication tool. As a tool of communication, it should be supported by some understandable sentences and words so that the listener could understand those sentences and words. The complex process of interaction between two people or more so that they could understand each other means speaking (Brown, 1994;. When the people speak, they produce some sentences or utterances that would be listened and analyzed by the listener so that they could respond as the first speaker expected. As a productive skill from four skills in English, speaking is very important to be learned by the English learners. Clark and Clark (1997) state that speaking is basic tool for communication. As a basic tool for communication, speaking plays an important role in the process of learning English. Speaking skill requires the learners to be active to practice their skill. The learners could not master this skill if the students tend to be passive students in learning this skill. The more active the learners perform in this skill the more value the learners get from this Moreover, Neu dan Resser (1997) describes that information gap activity as a condition where a person that want to share a certain information in solving a problem and gathering it or making decision of it. In other words, this technique indirectly force the speaker to be active to communicate between two or more speakers. Basturkmen (1994) cited in Almira, Aziz, Erdina (2017) asserts that Information Gap Activity is for fascinating the position in the completing the task and to promote the authentic of target language for the students. This activity is appropriate for the students when they work in pair or group. Using this activity indirectly stimulate the students to be active in speaking.
The previous study that was done by Almira, Aziz, and Erdina (2017) entitled Information Gap in Teaching Speaking was strongly related to this study. In their study Almira and friends stated that their study aimed to find out whether or not the use of information gap technique can improve students' performance in English speaking ability and helps teachers in teaching speaking. The result of their study describes that the posttest result was higher that the pretest result. The conclusion of the study was that information gap can be used as one of alternative techniques in teaching speaking.
For this reason the writer then interested in offering an activity in learning speaking. Such technique is information gap activity. This activity hopefully could stimulate the English learners especially the 4 th semester students at nursing science study program STIK Siti Khadijah Palembang in academic year 2019/2020.
Based on the explanation above, the writer formulated the questions for this study; is there any significant difference before and after the students were taught using Information Gap Activity? The objective of this study is to find out the significant difference in speaking achievement before and after the students were taught using information gap activity.

Method of the Study
The pre-experimental method was used in this study using one group pretest-posttest design. It means that the experimental group only will be treated because there will be no control group in this study. The design of one group pretest-posttest is as follow (Creswell, 2008) 01 x 02

Figure 1. One Group Pretest-Posttest Design
The study was done at STIK Siti Khadijah Palembang. The population of this study was be the 4 th semester students of S1 Nursing Science program at STIK Siti Khadijah Palembang in academic year 2019/2020. The total sampling was used to select the sample. The total number of the sample is 22 students.

Technique for Collecting and Analyzing the Data
The test was used in this study as an instrument to collect the data. The test was administered twice as pretest and posttest. The pretest was given before the treatment and the posttest was given after the treatment. There were three phases in collecting the data. The first phase is giving the result to each students, finding the mean, and comparing the means of the tests. The result was given based on the interval: 9-10 (Very Good), 7-8 (Good), 4-6 (Fair), and 1-3 (Poor).
The SPSS program was used to analyzed the result of the tests. The mean of the pretest and posttest was compared to find out the significant difference before and after the treatment given to the 4 th semester students of S1 nursing science study program at STIK Siti Khadijah Palembang.

Results
The study was implemented to the 4 th semester students of S1 Nursing Science program at STIK Siti Khadijah Palembang in academic year 2019/2020. The study was implemented in March 2020 intensively. The pretest was given before the treatment and the posttest was given after the treatment in this study. The result of the test was presented in form of table 1 and table 2  1 shows the pre-test score and the table 2 shows the post-test score. At the pretest, the lowest score was 3 and the highest score was 7. The mean score was 4.86 and standard deviation was 1.283. At the posttest, the lowest score was 4 and the highest score was 9. The mean score was 6.05 with standard deviation was 1.397. The students category was in line to the students score. It can be seen from the figures below:

. Students' Posttest Category
From 22 students in the pretest, it was found that there were 4 students at the poor category, 15 students at fair category, 3 students at good category, and no student at very good category. After posttest was given, there were 1 student at poor category, 13 students at fair category, 7 students at good category, and 1 student at very good category.
Since the correlation between pre-test and post-test in the experimental group was 0.694 and the significant level was 0.00. The value of sig (2 tailed) was 0.00. Since 0.00 was lower than alpha value 0.05, it can be interpreted that the Information Gap Activity which was given was effective. The paired sample t-test was used to analyzed the result of the pretest and posttest. The SPSS program was applied during the process of analyzing those results.

Discussion
The aim of this study was to find out the significant difference in speaking achievement before and after the students were taught using Information Gap Activity. The problems the writer found from the students such as lack of vocabulary, inappropriate structure, feel shy, or mispronunciation were can be solved by the students after passing the treatment. For example, in the pretest the some of the students feel shy, do not interactive, mispronounce in speaking. After passing some treatment, the students look interactive, produce some new vocabularies, pronounce correctly and feel confident. It means that the Information Gap activity influences them and plays the role as a trigger to improve the students speaking skill.
Using Information Gap Activity indirectly forces the students to be active in speaking. Since the students need to exchange the information to fill in the gap, both of them have to build the communication bridge so that each of them understand each other. Once the gap appears, the students who involve in the communication needs to reconstruct it again.

Conclusion
The writer concluded that Information Gap Activity could improve students achievement in speaking skill significantly. The data could be seen from the students mean score in the pretest and posttest. The students score in the posttest better than the students score in the pretest. In addition, applying this activity to the 4 th semester nursing science students at STIK Siti Khadijah positively influence the students. The students looks more communicative in speaking class. Actually, there were some factors cause this improvement. The condition in the classroom and campus could be internal factors that influenced them. The total number of the students in the classroom is 22 students. The students could interactively communicate in the classroom. Moreover, the campus condition was still not very active. This situation can be exploited by the students to pass the treatment effectively.