Improving the Eighth Year Students Summary Writing Ability Through the Use of Story Pyramid at SMPN 3 Jember in the 2008 / / 2009 Academic Year

Abstract

n learning language, the four skills: speaking, reading, listening, and writing as well as three components: grammar, vocabulary, and pronunciation must be mastered. However, among those four skills, writing is a skill that is considered to be the most difficult one. It is stated by Hugley et al. (1983:38), that writing is often found as the most difficult skill of all the English skills both as the first and second language. One of the most important types of writing students use in school is writing to summarize. When the students read a story, to indicate whether they understand the stoiy or not, they can make a summary about the story they have read. It means that after reading a story, the students can share their understanding of the story they have read by summarizing the story. Based on the preliminary study, the eighth grade students at SMPN 3 Jember who learn English as a foreign language still got difficulties in writing a summary of a story. It can be known from the average scores of students’ summary writing test result that was 65. On the other hand, the students should gain score 75 to pass English test. In this case, they have problem in mastering the aspects in writing summary. First, it is shown by their inability to write grammatically correct sentences. Second, the students do not have enough vocabulary as indicated by the use of words without considering context. And third, the students cannot figure out what to include and what to leave out in the content of the summary. Classroom action research with the cycle model was applied in this research because this research was intended to improve the eighth grade students* summary writing ability through the application of story pyramid. This research was done in collaboration with the English teacher to conduct the study with the researcher. This study was conducted at SMPN 3 Jember. The reason was story pyramid has never been used by the English teacher in the teaching of writing to improve the students’ summary writing ability. The subject of research was the eight grade students of SMPN 3 Jember in the 2008/2009 academic year, especially in the class VIII E. In this research, participant observation used since the researcher participated in the teaching- learning process and cooperated with the teacher as the non-participated observer. In taking the data, the researcher used checklist for observing the students’ activeness and passiveness during the teaching learning process. The indicators in the checklist covered: asking questions, answering questions, paying attention, and being enthusiastic during the lesson. In this CAR, the test applied was achievement test. Writing test was given twice in each cycle which was given after the implementation of the actions. The scoring method applied in scoring the students’ writing test was analytical method. In this case, there were three indicators scored analytically: grammar, vocabulary, and content. In the interview with the English teacher, unstructured/ open-ended questions were used because these questions had a great number of answers. So, an interview guide was used to lead the researcher in the process of interviewing. In order to achieve the goal of this classroom action research, the action was implemented in two cycles. The first cycle was conducted on April 15th and 21st 2009. The test was done on April 22nd 2009. Based on the process and product evaluation, the students ability still could not be improved through the use of story pyramid. Based on the results of observation in the cycle one, it was found that only 17 students or at least 60.7% of the students were actively involved during the teaching learning process. Besides, from the results of the test in the first cycle, it was also found that the mean score of the students’ summary writing test was only 69.6 and the percentage of the student amount that got 75 or more was only 44.4% or only 12 students who achieved 75 or more.