ESSENTIAL ROLE OF LANGUAGE LABORATORY TO ENHANCE NAUTICAL SCIENCE STUDENT’S COMMUNICATION ABILITY IN MARITIME ACADEMY OF YOGYAKARTA

Sari

In the English Language Teaching (ELT) process, the four basic skills of
reading, writing, speaking, and listening should be drilled continuosly to get
the maximum goal of English learning objective. However, mostly the lecturer
or the teacher could not concern to the development of those skills due to some
constraints. Classroom factor, strategy factor, student’s factor, lecturer’s
factor may hamper the development of those skills at once. Regarding the
curriculum, mostly lecturer will catch up to student’s writing skill which
involves the mastery of grammatical knowledge and reading competence at
class. Somehow, the important of the development of speaking and listening
or communication ability is neglected. This research focusses to find the
essential role of language laboratory to enhance student’s communication
ability. It is hoped that the use of laboratory facility will enable and help
lecturer or teacher to highlight their student’s communication ability as well
not only their writing and reading skills as a whole.
This study applies descriptive qualitative method and It uses theory of
Wallace (1991) to analyze the data. The research is conducted in Yogyakarta
Maritime Academy. The respondents are the the students of nautical science
semester II of Academic year 2015/2016. The key instrument in this research
is the researcher herself. Researcher collects the data by observing the
teaching-learning process of English class in laboratory several times and
then conducts twice in-depth interviews with the students at the end of the
class. The data is analyzed through categorization based on the continuous
comparison technique. To get the trustworthiness, researcher uses
triangulation technique.
The result of the research shows that through the abundant variety of
teaching technique and media as well as the facilities offered by language
laboratory, it could give important role in the development of student’s
speaking skill or student’s communication ability compared to the use of
facilities in the classical room usage..
Key words:Role, Language laboratory, Enhance Communication ability