Improving the Tenth Grade Students’ Descriptive Text Writing Achievement by Using “Think-Talk-Write” Strategy

Abstract

This classroom action research was intended to improve the tenth Science 5 grade students’ writing achievement by using “Think-Talk-Write” strategy at SMAN 1 Arjasa. The Preliminary study was conducted in the form of interview with the English teacher of SMAN 1 Arjasa. It was known that the tenth grade students of SMAN 1 Arjasa, especially the tenth Science 5 still had difficulty in writing a descriptive text. They were confused in finding, generating, expressing and exploring their ideas into a descriptive text. There were only 42.85% students from 35 students who got ≥75. The teacher further said that the students’ active participation of students X Science 5 was also low, there were only 45% were active. Thus, the researcher tried to overcome the problem by using “Think-Talk- Write” strategy in teaching writing a descriptive text. The study was done in two cycles to check the consistency of the research result. Each cycle covered two meetings of the action implementation and one meeting for administering the test. Besides, the observation checklist consisted of 4 indicators, namely 1) Making a note related to the pictures, 2) Finding ideas, 3) Discussing & Finding information about a text, 4) Composing the descriptive text. The students were categorized as active if they could fulfill at least 3 indicators. The observation results in Cycle 1 in the first meeting showed that there were 82.85% or 29 students of 35 students who participated actively during teaching learning process. In the second meeting, there were 87.87% or 29 students of 33 students who were actively participating during teaching and learning process of writing. The average results of the students’ participation in Meeting 1 of Cycle 1 and Meeting 2 of Cycle 1 was 85.36%. Besides, the results of writing test in the Cycle 1 showed there were 77.14% or 27 students of 35 students achieved.