Use of Grasps Model in Enhancing Speaking Skills: The Case of Indonesian Students

Abstract This experimental research was aimed at finding out how effective GRASPS Performance-Based model in improving the students’ public speaking skill. The study adopted a pre-test, and post-test control group design, to examine the impact of GRASPS on students’ Speaking Proficiency. Moreover, a mix-methods which applied both qualitative and quantitative analyses were employed to comprehensively reveal the result. The result illustrated that there were significant enhancement of students’ speaking skill among the GRASPS students compared with those of control class in general and cohesive devices speaking scale in vocabulary, pronunciation, grammar, comprehension, background knowledge and fluency constructs. It also indicated that there was significant improvement of public speaking skill of experimental group since all P value are smaller than 0.05 indicating that F value is larger than those of critical values expires tailed and two expires tailed test for α = 0.05 as level of sigma (P ≤ α). Thus it can be interpreted that the null hypothesis (Ho) stating “There is no difference between pre-test and post- test scores” is rejected; it means there are significant differences between pretest-public test scores after being taught through GRASPS Performance-Based instruction. In conclusion; by implementing this performance-based instructional model—GRASPS in teaching language, especially English in EFL context seemed to be really beneficial since it provides teacher with performance-based instructional material so that their teaching is not only limited on conventional teaching media but also more emphasized on meaningful learning. Keywords: GRASPS model, performance-based assessment, public speaking skills, educational intervention, EFL learners.