Improving the Tenth Year Students’ Writing Skill by Using Brainstorming Technique at SMA Assa’adah Bungah Gresik

Abstract

Writing plays an important role in the context of English teaching as a foreign language in Indonesia. Students of Senior High School are expected to be able to use English in oral and written form. It means that they are expected to be able to express their ideas through speaking and writing. Writing is regarded as a complex and difficult skills teach to the students. Based on the preliminary study at SMA Assa’adah Bungah Gresik, it was known that the tenth year students still experienced difficulties in writing English in term o f generating and developing their ideas. It was proved when the students were asked to write a narrative paragraph, they often did not know how to begin. They took a long time to think before they started to write. Consequently, they just concerned with how to finish their writing soon rather than how to make a good composition in writing narrative paragraphs by preparing what to be written. As a result, the score of students’ writing test proved unsatisfactory as it can be seen from the average scores o f the students’ writing test 64 below the standard passing grade o f the school 70. Besides, the students’ participation in writing activities indicated passive participation that was only 50% students who were able to do the required task in time. Indeed, the English teacher tried to solve the students’ problem in memorizing new vocabularies by using pictures in series as media and applying cooperative language learning. However, those techniques were not yet effective for the students to generate and developed their ideas. The students were still unable to solve their difficulties in writing a paragraph although the teacher applied cooperative language learning approach. Considering the above problems, this research was undertaken to overcome the students’ problem by using brainstorming technique. Brainstorming is one of prewriting techniques that can help students develop the topic by asking many questions as the writer think about the subject. This means that brainstorming technique was able to arouse the students’ motivation and improve the students’ writing skill. The Classroom Action Research (CAR) with the cycle model was applied in this research. The action research was carried out to improve the tenth year students’ writing skill by using brainstorming technique at SMA Assa’adah Bungah Gresik. This Classroom Action Research was conducted in two cycles, in which each cycle covered four main stages of activity namely; planning of the actions, implementation of the actions, class observation and evaluation, data analysis and reflection o f the actions. Then each cycle was conducted in two meetings. The primary data about the students’ writing skill were gained from the test done in each cycle in the third