Improving Students' Writing Ability by Using Personal Photograph of Seventh Year Students at SMPN 4 Banyuwangi in the 2014/2015 Academic Year

Abstract

English plays important role for all aspects because the development of science and technology is mostly transferred through it. English is taught in the forms of speaking, writing, listening and reading integrative. Among the four language skills, writing is considered to be most difficult to master, because it needs continues thinking process for expressing ideas, feelings, or thought in a piece of paper. The research was carried out at SMP 4 Banyuwangi. The subjects of the research are the students of the seventh grade A student. The research method was classroom action research. This classroom action research had two cycles which consisted of four main stages in each cycle. They are preparation, implementation, observation, and reflection of the action. In each cycle, the teaching and learning process were conducted into three meetings which include two meetings of applying method and one meeting for the writing test. In the first cycle the researcher used personal photograph as a media in teaching descriptive text, researcher asked students to describe their personality and their families in the class based on the example that had been given by the researcher. In the second cycle, researcher asked students to describe their friend in photos that was brought by the student in group. The result of preliminary study showed that the main score of the students’ writing descriptive paragraph result was low (M= 49,78). Meanwhile, the standard minimum passing level score in this school is 75. In the first cycle on Monday, 11st May until 16th M a y 2 0 1 5 i n t h r e e m e e t i n g s , t h e r e s e a r c h e r found the mean of the score of the students’ writing was 74,83 with the total score 2694. In the second cycle on Monday 18th May until 25th May 2015, the researcher found the mean of the score of the students’ writing was 79,72 with the total score 2870. Based on that fact, the result of the research shows that the students improve their ability in writing descriptive text by using personal photograph as the media. They are better in writing and arranging the sentences than in pretest. The objectives of the research are firstly to know the improvement of students’ ability in writing descriptive paragraph. The second is to find out how the use of personal photograph to improve the students’ writing descriptive paragraph