Improving students’ fluency through voice recording * Aldy Rizky Nesapiradana & Rahmila Murtiana LBPP LIA Banjarmasin Abstract Fluency as an important goal in learning English is the ability to produce the language smoothly and naturally. The problem is, learners often fail to achieve the expected fluency despite the time spent in learning English. In an attempt to help learners improve their fluency, we conducted this classroom action research. Two classes of Intermediate 4 at LIA Banjarmasin were selected to be the object of this research. The students in both classes were asked to read a monologue and their voice was recorded. The result was then played, and the teacher pointed out which parts needed improvement. At this stage, the teacher modeled the correct chunks, intonation, and stress. The next step, the students were asked to re-read the monologue, re-record their voice, and play the result to see the improvement. The result is, through this procedure most of the students were able to improve their reading fluency, as evidenced by their correct use of chunking, phrasing, intonation, and word stress. Background One important goal in learning English is fluency, that is, the ability to produce the language smoothly and naturally. Fluency involves a degree of automaticity and the ability to retrieve ready-made chunks of language (McCarthy, 2010). The term fluency is more often associated with speaking skills, while actually it can also be applied to reading skills. In reading, fluency is defined by the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) as "the ease or 'naturalness' of reading, including how a reader groups or phrases words as revealed through intonation, stress, and pauses, and expresses oneself in feeling, anticipation, and characterization during oral reading” (http://www.learningrx.com/reading-fluency.htm). Reading fluency is a challenge for students who learn English as a foreign language, not only they have to deal with the pronunciation but also with the appropriate chunk and word stress to make the text meaningful. Ford (2012) stated that fluent readers are able to read words accurately and automatically with expression, and they can focus their attention on the text's meaning because they do not have to slow down in order to concentrate on decoding the individual words in a text. In this way, fluency acts as a bridge between word recognition and comprehension. Unfortunately, teachers often overlook the power of reading aloud, and emphasize more on silent reading activity. There has been a belief that reading aloud is an inauthentic language activity, while as a matter a fact, reading aloud can contribute to spoken fluency (Thornbury, 2005; Ford, 2012). Among the advantages of reading * Paper presented at the 6th LIA Research Colloquium, 22 October 2013. Published in LIA CAR Journal vol.6.