USING STICK FIGURES TO ENHANCE THE EIGHTH GRADE STUDENTS’ RECOUNT TEXT WRITING ACHIEVEMENT AT SMPN 11 JEMBER IN 2015/2016 ACADEMIC YEAR

Abstract

This research was intended to enhance the eighth grade students’ recount text writing achievement at SMPN 11 Jember especially the VIII B students. The students of VIII B were lack of vocabulary and less understanding in grammatical context. Besides, they did not really understand how to organize their thought in to writing. They were also confused how to start and end the writing and they had difficulties in finding the supporting details of the writing. According to the researcher’s observation in preliminary study, those aspects made the students faced difficulties in writing. In order to overcome the students’ problem, the researcher chose pictures as visual media to teach writing Picture was known as a common and interesting media in education field. There were so many pictures that can be used to help the students overcome their difficulty in learning English. Therefore, using pictures as media in English teaching and learning process could be seen as a good idea since English was considered as a foreign language that must be mastered by students. In the context of learning English, writing skill was considered as the most difficult skill in English. Most of the students students faced difficulties to learn English especially in learning how to write a text. In this case, the use of pictures was considered to be useful because teaching writing using pictures could be more interesting. In this research, the researcher used one kind of picture, that was, Stick Figures in Series. Stick Figures in Series were simple drawing that could be easily drawn by teacher. The shape of stick figures looked like a stick. Stick figures in series were believed to be able to help the students overcome their difficulty in learning writing because it provided some chronological events in which it could help the students to write a text. The objectives of the research were: (1) to enhance the eighth grade students’ writing achievement on recount text at SMPN 11 Jember (2) to describe how the learning task using stick figures can help the eighth grade students write a recount text at SMPN 11 Jember. The design used in this research was Classroom Action Research. SMPN 11 Jember was chosen purposively as the research area because the students in SMPN 11 Jember had difficulties in writing since were not able to write sentences by using the correct grammatical rules. The subject of this research was the class VIII B students. There were 38 students as the respondents of this research. There were two kinds of data collection methods in this research, primary and secondary data collection methods. The primary data got by conducting a writing test as the post-test to the research respondents. Meanwhile, the results of the secondary data of the research were obtained from the result of observation. This research consist just one cycle only in which it covered two meetings to implement the action and one meeting to conduct the writing test. The result of the writing test showed that there was an improvement that could be seen from the percentage of the students who got score ≥75 that increased from 42.10% in the preliminary study to 84.21% in the cycle 1. By this point, the second cycle is not necessary to be conducted. Thus, the research hypothesis which stated “ using stick figures can enhance the eighth grade students’ recount text writing achievement at SMPN 11 Jember” was accepted. Based on the explanation above, it could be concluded that the used of stick figures in series could improve the VIIIB students’ recount text writing achievement at SMPN 11 Jember in the 2015/2016 academic year.