34 result of their knowledge, while on the control group, the researcher would
ask the students wrote without giving picture series only the material which was given by the researcher.
The instrument was an essay type test. The English writing competences of Junior High School grade VIII is visualized in the table.
Table 3: The English writing competences of Junior High School
Standard of competency
Basic competences Indicators
12. Expressing
meaning of short functional
text and simple essays in daily
life in the form of narrative.
12.2 Expressing meaning of short
functional texts and simple essays in
daily life knowledge usage
accurately, fluently, and understandably
in the form of narrative.
• Students are able to use
correct organization of narrative texts.
• Students are able to use
correct grammatical rules.
• Students are able to find
meaning of unfamiliar words of narrative texts.
• Students are able to use
appropriate mechanics rules in creating a
narrative texts.
• Students are able to
make narrative texts.
35 Meanwhile, blueprint of the writing ability test that is used as a
concept in making test presented in table 4.
Table 4: The blueprint of the writing ability test
No Indicators
Aspect of Writing The item number 1
Writing a narrative
a. Content b. Organization
c. Vocabulary d. Language use
e. Mechanics
D. The validity of the Instruments
Hughes 2003 states that the term ‘validity’ in testing and assessment has been understood to mean discovering whether a test measures
accurately what it is intended to measure. Validity provides information on the extent to which the data collection procedure really measures what it is
supposed to measure. The instrument is developed on the basis of characteristic of positive
picture series proposed by some experts as presented in chapter two, so that is considered as having a content validity.
Content Validity
A test is said to have a content validity when the content of the test is a representative sample from the domain that is to be tested.
Content validity is used to measure the test that is appropriate with the materials
taught to the students or is appropriate with the syllabus based on the
36 Curriculum of Junior High School of year VIII of the second semester of
English subject.
E. The reliability of the Instruments
The reliability of a research instrument is the degree of consistency and dependence with which the instrument measures the attribute. Brown
2004: 20 says that a test can be said as a reliable test if it is consistent and dependable. It means that the same test given to the same students or
matched students on two different occasions should yield similar results. In this study the researcher used SPSS version 21 computer program
with the use of the interrater to get the result of the reliability of the writing test. The two raters used a scoring rubric for the writing test, the
researcher as the first rater and the teacher of English as the second rater. According to Creswell 2008, interrater reliability involves observations
made by two or more individuals of observed behavior. The observers record their scores of the behavior and then compare the scores to see if
their scores are similar or different.
The reliability of the writing test could be seen by its reliability coefficient, in order to know the categorization of the reliability
coefficient, the researcher used the categorization based on Anderson 2003:92 offers. The value of the reliability coefficient can be seen in the
following table.
