Investigating Student’s Fluency in Verbal Communication through Digital Platform

Abstrak

This research aimed to investigate students’ fluency in verbal communication through Free4talk.com website and the role of the website towards students’ fluency in verbal communication. In this research, the researcher used descriptive qualitative method. The data was obtained from students’ conversational performance with foreigner by using Free4talk.com website. By adapting the speaking assessment from Foreign Language Assessment Rubric of Tohoku Fukushi University, the researcher investigated students’ fluency in verbal communication by considering some aspects including vocabulary, grammar, pronunciation, overall fluency and interaction. Moreover, to emphasize the fluency quality from each student, the researcher tried to adapt the theory from Lennon by counting the word per minute (excluding repetitions), filled pauses, and the percentage of ‘thought unit’ followed by a pause from students’ utterance. From the investigation, the researcher found that each student has a different level of fluency in spoken-verbal communication due to several factors including students’ hesitation, a lack of capability to arrange the correct sentence, difficulty to explain the right statement, a lack of ability to understand the unfamiliar terminology, expression, advance vocabulary and varied accents from foreigner, unclear intonation and a low voice from speaking partners,etc. Moreover, the researcher found that free4talk.com website has an effective role in building a good fluency in spoken-verbal communication due to the utilization of thinking and communicating in English. From the result, it can be concluded that each student has a different level of fluency in spoken-verbal communication based on spoken-language assessment. Moreover, this digital platform is the effective media to create a better fluency in verbal communication through conversation.