THE EFFECT OF USING COMIC STRIPS ON THE EIGHTH GRADE STUDENTS’ NARRATIVE WRITING ACHIEVEMENT AT SMPN 5 JEMBER IN THE 2016/2017 ACADEMIC YEAR

Abstract

Writing is one of the most important aspects in English language acquisition. It is quite difficult to master writing, especially for EFL students in Indonesia, since there are some differences between Bahasa Indonesia and English such as grammatical and structural terms and styles. Furthermore, in the process of writing, the EFL students have to struggle in order to put ideas or arguments on the paper. They have to spend too much time in finding out the ideas about the topic given to write because they do not have enough basic knowledge and interest in writing. Therefore, the English teachers have to determine the effective strategies to improve their interest and ability in writing. They can apply media to help the students in teaching and learning process. Media are expected to create a more interesting writing class. Media also can be used to transfer the learning material to reach the goal of study and increase the students’ achievement. In this research, the researcher used comic strips by the help of free website namely ToonDoo.com in the internet. The objective of the research was to know whether not there is a significant effect of using comic strips on the eighth grade students’ narrative writing achievement at SMPN 5 Jember in the 2016/2017 academic year. The design of the research was quasi experimental research with posttest only design. The respondents of the research were the eighth grade students of VIII E and VIIIF at SMPN 5 Jember. The number of respondents was 62 students; 32 students were in the control group and 30 students were in the experimental group. In this research, VIII E was the control group and VIII F was the experimental group. The experimental group got treatment by using comic strips, while the control group used no media in conventional way. The data collection methods of this research were test, documentation, and interview. The test was used to get the primary data. The primary data was the students’ writing scores obtained after the end of the treatment. Meanwhile, the supporting data were gained from the result of interview and documentation from school. Before the research was conducted, the researcher had conducted a homogeneity test to know whether the population was homogeneous or not. By using ANOVA (Analysis of Variance) on SPSS (Statistical Package for Social Science), the homogeneity test result showed that the population was homogeneous, thus the researcher chose the respondents of the research randomly. After the treatment to the experimental group was administered, the data gained from post test on the experimental and control groups were analyzed by using Independent Sample T-Test on SPSS to find the significant difference of two groups. The result of the data analysis proved that comic strips had a significant effect on the eighth grade students’ narrative achievement. It was verified by the value of significant column of Lavene’s test which was 0.020. Because it was lower than the value of variance 0.05, the null hypothesis (H0) was rejected and the alternative hypothesis (Ha) was accepted. The results of DRE was 8.9120% which means that using comic strips in teaching narrative writing was 8.9120% more effective than teaching narrative writing without comic strips. Considering to the result of the research, it could be conducted that there was a significant effect of using comic strips on the eighth grade students’ narrative writing achievement at SMPN 5 Jember in the 2016/2017 academic year.