IMPROVING THE ELEVENTH GRADE STUDENTS’ ANALYTICAL EXPOSITION WRITING ACHIEVEMENT AND ACTIVE PARTICIPATION THROUGH MIND MAPPING TECHNIQUE AT MADRASAH ALIYAH DARUS SHOLAH JEMBER

Abstract

Writing is an important skill to communicate ideas, thoughts, concepts and feelings in written forms. It refers to production process to produce a piece of written work. Considering the acquisition of English as a foreign language, writing plays a very important role to help the students be able to understand and remember what they have just got about the new language. In fact, many students still experience difficulties in analytical exposition writing text. Based on the preliminary study with the English teacher of Madrasah Aliyah Darus Sholah Jember, it was known that the eleventh grade of IPS students still experienced difficulty in writing especially in text writing. It was indicated by the percentage of the students who got the score of at least 65 in the previous writing test given by the teacher, that was 62.5 %. Therefore, the researcher proposed Mind Mapping technique to overcome the students’ problem in writing. Some experts argue that mind mapping technique is an essential technique to develop ideas in the written forms. Chaffee (1999:13) claims that mind mapping is a powerful approach for writing to help students generate the ideas and begin organizing them into various relationships with the details in visual way. Gerson and Gerson (1993: 183-184) claim that mind mapping is more visual and free form. This technique develops the ideas so clear and detailed. Since it is started with the main topic, then provide some components and subpoints. The components are the statements that support the idea in the main topic. Then subpoints are the statements that support the components and the main topic indirectly. This technique was chosen as the alternative teaching techniques of writing lesson under the reason that this technique was useful to assist the students to write text well and it could be applied in the various genres of text. This technique was used to develop and generate the ideas into good analytical exposition writing. It is expected that by using mind mapping technique the students are able to write analytical exposition easily. This study employed a classroom action research design with the cycle model. This study aimed at improving the eleventh grade students’ analytical exposition writing achievement through mind mapping technique at Madrasah Aliyah Darus Sholah Jember to improve the eleventh students’ grade active participation in teaching learning process of writing through mind mapping technique at Madrasah Aliyah Darus Sholah Jember. The stages of this classroom action research covered a sequence of steps, namely the planning of the action, implementation of the action, class observation and evaluation and reflection of the action. This research was conducted at Madrasah Aliyah Darus Sholah Jember from April 27th, 2009 up to May 18th, 2009. It was done collaboratively with the English teacher. The doer of the actions was the researcher and the observer was the English teacher. This research was carried out into two cycles in which in cycle 1 consisted of four meetings including the test and in the cycle 2 had three meetings including the test. The research subjects were the students of class XI IPS. The primary data were collected from the observation of students’ active participation by using checklist and students’ writing achievement test. The criteria used to evaluate the success of the action were as follows: (1) if 75% of the students achieve the score of at least 65 as the standard score and (2) if 75% of the students participate actively in the writing teaching learning process by using mind mapping technique. Moreover, another observation was conducted to observe the teacher’s activity during teaching learning process. It was collected by using fieldnote. The actions in cycle 1 were conducted from April 27th, 2010 up to May 5th, 2010. The result of observation in cycle 1 revealed that the average of students’ active participation in the second meeting and the third meeting was 67.42 %. This result did not achieve the target requirement of this research. In addition, the percentage of the students who got the score of at least 65 was 69.57 % or it was obtained by 16 students out of 23 students doing the writing achievement test (one student did not attend to the test). It meant that the result did not achieve the target requirement of this research. There was one students who was absent in this test because the student was sick. Therefore, the results of cycle 1 had not achieved the target requirements of the research. It was caused by the students’ errors in grammar and mechanics. Thus, the action was continued in the second cycle by revising the writing materials and the lesson plans. The actions in cycle 2 were done on May 11th, 2010 up to May 18th, 2010. The result of the action in cycle 2 showed the improvement. The result of observation checklist showed that the average of students’ active participation in the first meeting and second meeting was 78.24 %. Furthermore, the students who got the score of at least 65 were 79.2 % which was better than the one in cycle 1. Based on the results, it could be concluded that the use of mind mapping technique could improve the students’ active participation and the students’ writing achievement in the writing teaching learning process. Finally, it is suggested for the English teacher to use Mind Mapping as the alternative teaching technique of writing that can make the improvement for both the students’ active participation and writing achievement during the writing teaching learning process of writing. Moreover, this research finding is also expected to be useful for the students to frequently practice this technique not only in writing analytical exposition text, but also in the other writing text types. Additionally, this research can be used by the other researchers as the information to undertake a further research related to the application of mind mapping technique so that they will be well prepared to what they have to do in the research.