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happy when they have a friend to write collaboratively. The material was still about an animal and then they were asked to develop it by their own ideas.
And the last, in the third meeting, the teacher reviewed the material of the previous meeting and explained it. In the third meeting, some of male students
still made noise. Here, the teacher asked them again to write a short composition by using steps of collaborative writing technique. The topic was still about an
animal which was different from the previous meeting. The helper and writer were active in writing a short composition. They did it based on their role. The result of
their writings had been good but it was short and not too detail. In writing the text, the students were guided by the teacher. They still did
not know about the collaborative writing technique because the technique was not familiar yet to them. The teacher then explained it and asked them whether they
had questions or not. At that time, they kept silent and no questions. After that, they wrote it collaboratively as a helper and a writer. When they wrote
collaboratively, the class situation was very noisy and sometimes they were not serious to write. As the result, their writing was not good. They had some
problems in vocabulary and incorrect grammar.
b. Students’ learning progress
In the first meeting, the students had not yet been able to write a descriptive text well, but they were just able to answer the teacher’s questions
dealing with the activities. In this case, the teacher showed animals’ pictures in the LCD projector so that the students could answer and describe them easily. Then,
the teacher explained about a descriptive text, gave an example of descriptive text,
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and asked them to answer the questions related to the text. In doing the exercises, the students were asked to write collaboratively in the first meeting but they still
had many problems in all aspects of writing. In the second meeting, the students were supposed to be able to write a
descriptive text based on the collaborative writing technique in the pair. Since the collaborative writing technique was a new technique for them, at the beginning
they were confused and not enthusiastic to start writing. In doing writing in the pair at that time, the students felt free to express and explore their ideas in writing.
They shared their knowledge to one another. The students were also actively involved in working in a pair. Therefore, they could interact with hisher partner
to create a descriptive text. They could arrange and organize the sentences into paragraphs. Besides their progress, they had problems in choosing appropriate
words or vocabulary and grammatical mistakes of the text. After following step by step, they could finish it but the result of their writings was still not good.
In the third meeting, there was also a progress of their learning. Here, they were still asked to write the descriptive text about an animal which was different
from the previous meeting. The pairs did the task more silently and more enthusiastically because they had had a writing practice in the previous meeting
collaboratively. Their writings in this meeting were better than the previous one. The pairs improved in expressing their ideas but their writings only had some
little elaboration and lack of detail in writing. In addition, the students also improved their mastery of descriptive text,
learned the generic structure of descriptive text, and the example of descriptive
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text. By doing the exercises related to descriptive text, they had mastery on understanding descriptive text. Besides, the understanding of mechanics improved
in their writing. It appeared when they were more carefully in using mechanics to create and write a descriptive text. Their problems were still low in choosing
appropriate words or vocabulary and mastering of grammar especially in using present tense.
The last meeting was post-test of cycle 1. It was done on December 8
th
, 2010. They did individually. The teacher explained the instruction clearly before
the students did the test. The topic was about an animal. The students chose one of animals which were provided in the question sheet. In writing, they did not feel
nervous or anxious at all due to the fact they had got enough exercises and experiences from the previous meetings from the pre-test. There were 28 students
who took a post-test. They were given forty five minutes to finish it. They were asked to pay attention to the writing aspects to score. They were content,
organization, vocabulary, grammar, and mechanics. Based on the result of the post-test, the teacher could report as follows:
The post-test scores from the first scorer could be reported that the highest score was 92.00, the lowest score was 44.00, and the average score was 63.14. In
summary, it could be shown in the following table.
Table 4.2 The students’ post-test average score of cycle 1
from the first scorer No Explanation
Score
1. The highest
score 92.00
2. The lowest score
44.00 3.
The average score 63.14
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Furthermore, those scores could be analyzed in more details into five aspects of writing. They were score of content, organization, vocabulary,
grammar, and the last is mechanics. The result of the analysis can be seen on the following table.
Table 4.3 The students’ post-test average scores based on the writing aspects of
cycle 1 from the first scorer No
Writing Aspects Average Scores
1 Content 70.00
2 Organization 63.57
3 Vocabulary 62.14
4 Grammar 55.71
5 Mechanics 64.29
The post-test scores from the second scorer could be reported that the highest score was 92.00, the lowest score was 40.00, and the average score was
64.14. In summary, it could be seen on the table below.
Table 4.4 The students’ post-test average scores of cycle 1
from the second scorer No Explanations
Scores
1 The highest
score 92.00
2 The lowest score
40.00 3
The average score 64.14
The result of each aspect for writing could be shown on the following table.
Table 4.5 The students’ post-test scores based on the writing aspects of cycle 1
from the second scorer No
Writing Aspects Average scores
1 Content 72.86
2 Organization 65.71
3 Vocabulary 61.43
4 Grammar 56.43
5 Mechanics 64.29
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From the average of two scorers, the researcher could report that the highest score was 92.00; the lowest score was 42.00, and the average score was
63.64. In short, it could be shown in the following table below:
Table 4.6 The students’ post-test average scores of cycle 1
from the two scorers No Explanations
Scores
1 The highest
score 92.00
2 The lowest score
42.00 3
The average score 63.64
There were five writing aspects that were analyzed: content, organization, vocabulary, grammar, and mechanics. The results of the analysis could be shown
on the following table.
Table 4.7 The students’ post-test scores based on the writing aspects of cycle 1
from the two scorers No
Writing Aspects Average scores
1 Content 71.43
2 Organization 64.64
3 Vocabulary 61.78
4 Grammar 56.07
5 Mechanics 64.29
From the table above, it could be concluded that grammar and vocabulary
became the main problems for the students since the average scores of them were lower than other writing aspects in spite of the fact that there was a bit increase on
the students’ achievement. Those were because the teacher did not give explanation and material more about the vocabulary and grammar due to the
limited time in the teaching and learning process. Most of the students could not choose appropriate words for the topic which they wrote and sometimes they
forgot to implement the words into writing. For the grammar, the students did not
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understand well about present tense. They did not know how to use the verbs or to be in the present tense and they also forgot to add ses in the verbs and singular or
plural. Besides, the teacher did not train them as well for focusing in vocabulary and grammar. Then, in evaluating step of writing process the students still seemed
passive or lazy to ask questions about the problems what they faced especially in vocabulary and grammar. So that was why the students got the lower average for
the aspects of vocabulary and grammar in the post-test cycle 1. Based on the observation in cycle 1, it was found there were improvement
of students’ ability in writing a descriptive text, improvement of students’ behavior, and improvement of students’ motivation.
4. Reflecting the action
