According to curriculum 2013, the students must master fours skills in English. Those are: writing skill, listening skill, reading skill and speaking skill. It is hoped that the students are able to use English in this globalization era both receptively and productively. However, speaking skill is mostly used in the daily life because it is used for direct communication. In this research, the writer would like to explain the Segmental and suprasegmental features production like stress as the standard for people learning the spoken English. It is aimed to make the students should be able to join the sounds in a sequence to the next sound without difficulty or stumbling. Because of that, poems are commonly used to practice and teach pronounciation for English learners. The researcher used poems because reading English poem is believed to have direct influence on the pronunciation skills. The objectives of the study are:
1. To find out how good students Grade XI of SMA WALISONGO Semarang in the Academic Year 2014/ 2015 perform pronunciation ability on segmental features and word stress before they learn reading poems.
2. To find out the students’ progress in the pronunciation ability after they learn reading poems.
The subjects of this study were the students of eleventh-IPA grade students of SMA Walisongo Semarang in academic year of 2014/2015. The number of the subjects was 25 students. This research is a classroom action research. It was done through three cycles. The researcher used documentation, test and observation to collect the data. The researcher used descriptive qualitative to analyze the data. This research uses qualitative, because the data is not analyzed by statistical procedure.
Result of the study showed that by reading English poem at the of eleventh-IPA grade students of SMA Walisongo Semarang in academic year of 2014/2015 can improve students’ pronunciation. This successfulness can be seen from the result of students’ average score and good responses by students. The result after getting all of the treatment using English poems, the students’ average score increased in line with the increase of the students’ achievement in each cycle. Students’ average score from the pre-cycle was 50,24, first cycle was 59,48, second cycle was 65,56, and the post-test was 73,48.
Finally the result of this research showed that students’ understanding improved in each cycle after they were taught using poems. It was signed by their improvements of each result test.