THE EFFECT OF USING THE CLUSTERING TECHNIQUE ON THE EIGHTH YEAR STUDENTS’ WRITING ACHIEVEMENT AT SMPN 2 CLURING BANYUWANGI IN THE 2011/2012 ACADEMIC YEAR

Abstract

Indonesian students, as EFL learners, often experience problems in English writing especially the difficulties to generate the ideas. They have to do the prewriting activity before doing the writing process to make it easier to be done. To help the students’ problem in generating the ideas, the teacher needs to give a prewriting technique. Based on the above reason, the researcher used the clustering technique in teaching writing to the students. It is one of the prewriting techniques that can help the students to find the ideas by drawing some words by using balloons and connecting each word by using lines. By using the clustering technique, the students can know the relation of each word, so they can generate the ideas easily. The clustering technique can help the students to solve their problems in generating the ideas. By using it, the students can find some words related to their writing, so they can prepare the vocabularies before doing the writing process. The students are asked to do the prewriting first. They had to find the words related to the topics by using clustering technique. This research was conducted to investigate whether or not there was a significant effect of using clustering technique on the writing achievement of the eighth year students at SMPN 2 Cluring Banyuwangi. The respondents of this research were the eighth year students of SMPN 2 Cluring Banyuwangi in the 2011/2012 academic year. The researcher determined the two classes by using lottery. The total number of the respondent was 78 students, divided into the experimental group and the control group. The experimental group consisted of 39 students and the control group consisted of 39 students. After determining the experimental and control class, then the researcher gave the same pretest to both classes. After that, the experimental class was taught writing by using clustering technique as the prewriting technique, while the control class was taught writing without the clustering technique. After the students were taught for 3 meetings, they were given the same posttest of writing. The primary data of this research were collected from the post test of writing test. The main data of this research were analyzed by using ANCOVA (Analysis of Covariance). The result of this research showed that there was a significant effect of using the clustering technique on the eighth year students’ writing achievement. It was proven by the value of significant column of ANCOVA by using SPSS, the result was 0.003. It was lower than 0.05. Based on the explanation above, it could be concluded that there was a significant effect of using the clustering technique on the eight year students’ writing achievement at SMPN 2 Cluring Banyuwangi. Based on the result of this research, it is recommended to the English teacher to use the clustering technique in teaching writing because it can help the students to generate the ideas for developing them into a recount paragraph.