Improving Students Competence in Writing Functional Text Using Pictures

ABSTRACT

      In educational life, where teachers interact with the stakeholders of education also may arise problems, more and more with their students. The teachers are demanded to know their students’ problem. The actual problem of this action research was to improve students’ competence in writing functional text using pictures. The researcher and the participants agreed to solve questions (1) Does the learning process improve? (2) Does the students writing competence improve after using pictures? 

       The method was an action research. Part of the data were narrative as obtained from a sequence of in-depth interview, narrative gained from interview, observation data as gained from a sequence of classroom observations in teaching practices and classroom situation. The qualitative data were collected from two collaborators of the research, recorded in depth-interviews, classroom observation, audio tape, result of questionnaire and document check. The quantitative data were achieved from the participants in writing functional text from the pre-test, first, second, third cycles. The research was conducted from May 2011 to October 2011 in a Junior High School in Gunungkidul.

     The qualitative result shows that students were more interested in the learning process, better interaction between students and teachers, good cooperation, curiosity, responsibility between teachers and students. The result of questionnaire for the mean was 4.53. The result of standard deviation was 5.67 from the maximum score of 5.00, and the minimum score of 3.0. It meant that most of students agreed or even strongly agreed that there was the improvement of the learning process.

      For the quantitative results, the starting competence was low (average 51.87). The improvement of the second cycle was not significant (average 54.28). Quantitatively, the picture use gradually improved the writing competence as shown by the averages of the pretest and posttest of the first, second, and third cycles (X pre=51.87, Xc1= 54.28, Xc2= 67.22, Xc3= 72.06). The result from the pre-test to the post test was processed using t-test to know the level of significant. I had to use t-test to confirm the significant level of the findings. The findings showed that the result was significant since the result was .000<.05 (sig.(2-tiled). The level of significant was 0.5. And .000 was below 0.5. The action research would provide theoretical benefits for the teacher participant, the researcher, and other researchers.