School Policy in Improving Students’ Speaking Ability: a Case Study at a Bilingual Boarding High School in Academic Year 2019/2020

The fact shows that most Indonesian students’ speaking ability is still considered unsatisfactory. It becomes issues whether Indonesian formal educations are capable to overcome students’ need in all four English skills especially speaking or not. For schools and English teachers, overcoming this problem becomes a huge challenge because Indonesian learners still underestimate on the capability of formal educations also English teachers to educate them in a right way. This research will investigate the school’s policy and the teachers’ role in improving students’ speaking ability in a Bilingual High School in Indonesia.The formulations of the research problem in this research were: what the school policies are in improving students’ speaking ability; how the teachers do implement the school policies to encourage the students to improve their speaking ability; what the impacts of the implementation of the school policies are on the improvement of the students’ speaking ability.The purposes of this research were to get information about some school policies related to students speaking ability at the subject school Academic Year 2019/2020, which cover: school policies in improving students’ speaking ability; teachers’ ways in implementing the school policies to encourage the students to improve their speaking ability; the impact of the implementation of the school policy on the improvement of students’ speaking ability.Research methodology applied in this research included: 1) The research design is Case Study; 2) Subjects of this research are vice principal of curriculum, English teachers and students of tenth grade of the subject school; 3) The data of this research were taken from interview, observation, and documentation; 4) The techniques of data verification in this research are using triangulation and member check; 5) To analyze the data, the researcher conducted some steps include organizing and coding, summarizing, and interpreting the data.The final findings in this research included the fact that: 1) The subject school has several policies which support the students to improve their speaking ability including using English as the language instruction, obligating the use of English in every day interaction, and holding some English programs which can support the students to improve their speaking ability; 2) English teachers of the subject school have several ways in implementing the school policies including perform some teaching speaking strategies in teaching and learning processes and conduct some speaking activities which can encourage the students to improve their speaking ability; 3) The impact of the implementation of some school policies that encourage the students to improve their speaking ability can be seen from the students’ achievements, in which most of the students had significant progress in their speaking achievement, also there are some students winning some English competitions in several levels.Keywords: School Policy, Teaching Speaking, Speaking Activities.