The Use of Real Things to Improve Junior High School Students’ Writing Achievement

Abstract

This classroom action research was intended to improve the VII-A students‟ active participation and their descriptive text writing achievement by using real things at SMPN 1 Arjasa, Jember in the 2017/2018 academic year. Based on the result of the preliminary study which was done before conducting this research, only 9 students (30% of the students) getting score ≥ 75 while 21 students (70% of the students) getting score less than 75 in writing. According to the English teacher, only 50% of the students were active during the teaching and learning process of writing. Besides, based on the result of the informal interview with the English teacher, most students had difficulty in starting writing, organizing ideas, and choosing appropriate words. To overcome those problems, the researcher proposed real things as the instructional media in teaching writing. Ruis et al. (2009:7) state that real things are objects (coins, tools, plants, animals, or collection of artifacts) which the teachers can bring into the classroom to illustrate the meaning of teaching materials to be clearer, meaningful and memorable. They enable students to be motivated in learning English, because real things enable them to see, feel, hear and even smell the objects being observed (Jordan and Herrell, 2007:24). In other words, real things will help teachers make students focus and interested in writing class since they are watchable, touchable and observeable. Those are the reasons why the researcher believed that real things could improve students‟ active participation in the classroom and solve their problems in writing. The design of this research is classroom action research by adapting Lewin‟s model as it is quoted by Elliot (1991:70) with a sequence of steps. They are planning of the action, implementing of the action, classroom observation and evaluation, and reflection of the action. The research area was SMPN 1 Arjasa, Jember and the research participants were the VII-A students in 2017/2018 academic year. In this research, the data were obtained by doing classroom observation in every meeting and administering the writing test in the third meeting. The success criteria in this research were: 1) at least 70% of the students actively participated during the teaching and learning process of writing by using real things, 2) at least 70% of the students getting score ≥ 75 in the writing test. Further, the researcher did this research collaboratively with the English teacher. Moreover, by interviewing the English teacher, it was known that the percentage of VII-A students who were active during the teaching and learning process was 50%. After the actions in first cycle were implemented, the result of the classroom oservation showed that the VII-A students‟ active participation improved to 76.66% in the first meeting and 90% in the second meeting. And the average was 83.33%. It meant that the students‟ active participation achieved the success criteria of this research. Therefore, the cycle was stopped. Besides that, the result of writing test showed that the students‟ writing achievement was improved. The data from the preliminary study showed that only 30% of the students getting score ≥ 75. After the actions were implemented in the first cycle, the result of the writing test was 80% of the students getting score ≥ 75. That number of percentage indicated that there was improvement on the students‟ descriptive text writing achievement. Since it fulfilled the success criteria of this research, the action was stopped. Finally, it can be summarized that the use of real things could improve the VII-A students‟ active participation and their descriptive text writing achievement at SMPN 1 Arjasa, Jember in the 2017/2018 academic year.