THE IMPLEMENTATION OF PROJECT BASED LEARNING METHOD TOWARD STUDENTS OF SMP MUHAMMADYAH PROGRAM KHUSUS SURAKARTA Siti Fatimah Muhammadiyah University of Surakarta sfatimah@ums.ac.id Abstract This article aims at finding out whether Project Based Learning can improve students’ speaking skill or not and what speaking aspects are improved through Project Based Learning. It also aims at determning students’ respones toward the implementation of Project Based Learning Method.The step in implementing the Project-Based learning covers creating good atmosphere, attracting students’ attention, choosing the topic, creating the project, process and feedback, collecting the material, presenting and evaluating the project (Journal English Language Teaching.vol 1 no.3, November 2013). After implementing the method, the writer found out that Project-Based Learning have some advantages and also weaknsses. The advantages was initiated in the improvement of the students’ speaking aspects adapted from Harries (1984) and Brown (2004) which covers comprehension, vocabulary, grammar, fluency, and pronunciation. Of all the five aspects, comprehension and vocabulary were improved most significantly. Key words: project based learning, speaking INTRODUCTION Speaking is one of the skills that takes very important role in learning English language. Sometimes it measure someone’s ability as well. By speaking english well, someone can be determined to have good english proficiency. Otherwise, the other skills should also be taught while learning speaking since all are unseparable in learning English language. Yet, the mastery of speaking skill is a priority for students and they often evaluate their success in language learning as well as the effectiveness of their English learning especially in their spoken nlanguage proficiency (Richards, 2008: 19) In this case, in learning speaking English at class there are several factors that affect the learning process.Those factors include lecturers, students, the environment, as well as the facilities and systems used in the teaching learning process. These factors are related to each other in determining the success of the process of learning language. They may also affect the success of students in learning activities. Many lecturers these days tend to use conventional models in every learning process. They probably have lack of teaching methods mastery. Actually, the mastery of teaching method is necessary to improve their professional skills to vary his or her model of teaching. It may encourage students’ motivation in learning process as well. Conventional method in which lecturers merely give lectures in every meeting made students become passive in the class. Consequently, the students are not interested to learn more . Based on the previous facts, there is one learning models that supposed to be appropriate and more challenging to teach speaking skill. It is the Project-Based Learning. It is stated in the theory from Larmer and Mergendoller, a classroom filled with the students’ project may suggest that students have been engaged in meaningful learning. It is because the project is a series of tasks for the students to learn the content of material in depth comprehension in a group or individually. Project-Based Learning is a learning model that provides an opportunity for students to actively participate in making a project within the 380 ISSN 2503-5185