Determining Actions to Overcome the Selected Problems

49 In this case, there were several steps that the researcher had to go through in order to form the groups. First, she needed to conduct the writing pre-test and collect the required data. After that, it was necessary for the researcher to understand the students’ basic writing skills that could be seen through the pre-test results. Next, she had to rank the students based on those results. The following step was to take ten students with the lowest scores and ten students with the highest scores and divided them into ten groups which would make each group consist of one student with poor writing skills and one student with good writing skills. The rest of the students with average writing scores would randomly not sequentially based on the existing rankings be placed into those ten groups that had already been formed. It was important to put the student with above-average writing skills in a group with students that had average and especially below-average writing skills as the researcher could give the student with better writing skills responsibilities to “teach” their friends and help them throughout the process of learning writing. However, the researcher also set a rule that forbade those students with better pre- test scores to do all the writing tasks by themselves just because they could. They all were required to work in groups and no exception. Another thing that would also make a great deal of difference was to make students with the lowest pre-test scores in each group do all the writing for every writing task as the researcher realized that sometimes incompetency came from laziness. It was also said that one would remember better by writing things down. 50 This would, of course, give those students with poor writing ability more advantages and chances to practice writing. 2 Giving Materials and Providing Handouts of the Materials To solve the students’ problem in constructing English sentences, the researcher planned to give them materials that were related to grammar, especially sentence structure and tenses. She would teach the materials to the students mostly at the beginning of the first meeting as to provide or at least strengthen their basic knowledge on grammar which they would certainly use throughout the English teaching and learning process for this research. As it was mentioned above, the materials would be given mostly at the beginning of the first meeting, but it did not mean that the researcher only planned to give materials just at that one time. She also decided to provide additional materials from time to time throughout the course of this classroom action research. One thing that was no less important than teaching students the materials was to give them handouts of the materials. At the beginning of each meeting, right before she started explaining the materials to the students, the researcher would give the students handouts of the materials. By providing them with handouts, the researcher would not only save more time but also encourage the students to relearn the materials at home. Providing handouts of the materials really gave good advantages to both the researcher and also the students. Firstly, handouts would help the researcher save time as she did not need to wait for the students to write down of what she 51 was explaining as most of them had already been written in the handouts. Secondly, handouts were simpler and easy to read so the researcher could only imagine that it would give the students a little more drive and motivation to relearn the materials at home. 3 Providing the Students with Topic-related Vocabulary When one was not even familiar with English vocabulary, they had to just forget about learning this language altogether as it would be useless in the end. Vocabulary, along with grammar, was the base of language skills. That was why people needed to learn the basic grammar and vocabulary first before they could master any language skills, especially productive skills like speaking and writing. Limited vocabulary was an absolute hindrance when it came to language learning as one could not even form a simple sentence, spoken or written, if they did not have enough vocabulary to do so and teaching English as a foreign language would usually deal with this kind of problem. In this case, the researcher planned on solving the problem through an old- fashioned way by providing the students with related vocabulary. This hopefully would be quite effective as the students did not need to have vocabulary drills but to just learn selected vocabulary and use or apply them in their writing activities. The vocabulary would be selected based on the topics the students were learning to make it easier for them to pick up, memorize, use, and apply those words within particular contexts or situations especially in written language forms. 52 Not only providing the students with topic-related vocabulary, the researcher also planned on giving students the liberties to use their dictionaries during the lesson. Dictionaries were something really important for people who wanted to learn any languages. Even with more practice and experience, some advanced learners still needed them. That was why the researcher encouraged the students to bring their own dictionaries. By using dictionaries, the students would be able to not only know the meaning of a certain word but also understand how to put that word in a sentence as some types of dictionary provided sentence samples as well. This would, of course, give them more advantage in doing their writing activities. However, if they really did not have any dictionaries they could bring to class, the researcher would not force them to buy any. They could just borrow thei r friend’s dictionary when that friend was not in the middle of using it. 4 Teaching the Students to Give Peer Feedback Other than learning how to effectively generate ideas, correctly construct sentences, and appropriately use certain vocabulary in a sentence, the students would also learn to pay more attention to the mechanics of writing which included spelling, capitalization, and the use of punctuation marks. Some people might consider these details not important but in writing they were quite important as spelling errors and the use of incorrect capitalization or punctuation marks could actually shift the meaning and purpose of a sentence. Many students were usually not aware that they made so many spelling errors or often use incorrect capitalization and punctuation marks. The solution for