THE EFFECT OF APPLYING WH AND YES/NO QUESTIONS ON THE SEVENTH GRADE STUDENTS’ DESCRIPTIVE PARAGRAPH WRITING ACHIEVEMENT AT SMPN 2 KALISAT JEMBER

Abstract

The English teaching and learning activities at Junior High School (SMP) level are not only intended to develop students’ listening, reading, and speaking skills but also to develop their writing skills. From the four language skills above, writing is considered as the most difficult one. In fact, the students will have some troubles like cmposing an idea in writing. Concerning with writing as a difficult skill, it must be solved with a strategy or a technique of teaching, such as WH and Yes/No Questions in teaching writing. This quasi-experimental research with post test only control group design was conducted to investigate the effect of applying WH and Yes/No questions on the seventh grade students’ descriptive paragraph writing achievement at SMP N 2 Kalisat in the 2010/2011 Academic Year. The respondents of this research were class VII grade students of SMP N 2 Kalisat in the 2010/2011 Academic Year. The research respondents were determined by cluster sampling through a lottery. The total number of the respondents was 87 students, consisted of 44 students of class VIII B as the experimental class taught by WH and Yes/No questions on their writing class, while the control group consisted of 43 students of class VII E taught by Free Writing technique on their writing class. The primary data of this research were gained from the students’ writing achievement in the form of post test scores. The supporting data were gained from the interview with the English teacher and documentation. The primary data were collected from the post test to make comparison between the two groups after treatment and analyzed the result statistically by using t-test formula to know whether the achievement mean difference between the experimental group and the control group was significant or not. Based on the calculation, the mean score of the sexperimental group was higher than that of the mean score of the control group (74.72>71.10). The statistical value of t-test was 2.14 while the value of ttable at significant level of 5% with df (85) was 2.00. It means that the statistical value of t-test was higher than t-table. Consequently, the null hypothesis (H ) which was formulated as : “There is no significant effect of applying WH and Yes/No questions on the seventh grade students’ descriptive paragraph writing achievement at SMPN 2 Kalisat Jember” was rejected. Thus the alternative hypothesis (H a ) : “There is a significant effect of applying WH and Yes/No questions on the seventh grade students’ descriptive paragraph writing achievement at SMPN 2 Kalisat Jember” was accepted. Therefore, it can be stated that applying WH and Yes/No Questions effected significantly the seventh grade students’ descriptive paragraph writing achievement at SMP N 2 Kalisat Jember. Based on the result of this research, the English teacher is suggested to apply WH and Yes/No questions as a helpful model especially in teaching writing in order to achieve the students’ writing product.