Improving Students’ Descriptive Text Writing Achievement by Using Realia

Abstract

Writing plays an important role in teaching learning process, especially for EFL students. By having writing ability, the students are able to share some information, express their thought, experiences new things, and develop their ideas to the readers in written form. To find an effective and interesting way to motivate the students to write is by using media. Realia has been used as teaching aid not only to grab students’ attention, but also to overcome difficulties faced by the students in learning English. This Classroom Action Research focused on the use of realia to improve the seventh grade students’ descriptive text writing achievement. The participants of this research were the students of grade VII A in academic year 2017/2018 at SMPN 1 Grujugan, Bondowoso. The students were chosen as the participants in this research because most of the students could not reach the minimum requirement standard score (78) on writing test compared with the other classes. This research was held in two cycles with three meetings in each cycle. The first meeting and the second meeting were used to conduct a teaching and learning process of writing by using realia. Meanwhile, the third meeting was carried out to conduct writing test to the students. After conducting the writing test in Cycle 1, it was found that there were 53.8% of the total number of students who got the minimum score requirement (78). While, the minimum percentage requirement in this research was 75% of the students should got score 78 or higher. Based on the research result of Cycle 1, the researcher decided to conduct Cycle 2 by revising some needed aspects. Based on the result of the writing test in Cycle 2, the percentage of the students’ who got the minimum score requirement (78) increased from 53.8% in the first cycle to 84.6% in the second cycle. It could be concluded that the percentage of the students’ writing test had achieved the criteria of success in which at least 75% of students got the minimum requirement standard score of the writing test in SMP Negeri 1 Grujugan Bondowoso. Based on the result of Cycle 1 and Cycle 2, it could be concluded that the use of realia could improve students’ descriptive text writing achievement