Definitions of Tiered Activity

advanced outcomes, trainer should give the participants tiered activities by outcomes. When in achieving the same outcome participants are able to work in some kinds of ways, trainer should support the participants with tier activities by process. When the activity allows the participants to show what they have learned, trainer should tier the activities by product. Furthermore, there are also some options in distributing tiered activity. Everyone may work on Tier 1. In this case, trainer should provide some activities according to certain topic to discuss. All the participants work on the first level of the tiered activities. They are expected to be curious with what the next tiered activities have. Then, they automatically want to have more activities. However, if they don’t, trainer should guide them to have the other activities. Another option is participants choose a Tier they want. In this option, the participants can have whichever tiered activities they want to work on. This makes participants enjoy doing the activities although when the activities are actually not suitable for them. Trainer may also put the participants into cooperative groups. Participants are expected to have further discussion related to the topic they learn in group. This can be beneficial, but when there is a dominant participant in a group, this option may not work well. This option has an error when other participants depend on the dominant one. Besides, the option of all Tiers for all participants can be also implemented to get information about participant s’ achievement. Participant can achieve different points of tiered activities. The more participants do the activities correctly is the more points they have. Trainer observes and offers assistance while giving encouragement to participants during their work. The last is that trainer decides which participants get which Tier. To apply this option, trainer should totally understand the participant s’ achievement of their learning process since miss distributing leads to the failure.

B. Review of Relevant Research Studies

There are some other studies that have been conducted related to the effort of improving participant s’ writing skills by using tiered activities. One of them is a study that was held by Annatasya 2007 which is entitled The Implementation of The Principles of Tiered Tasks and Bias Tasks into a mixed-level class at EF – English First – Tanjung Duren. Through this study, Annatasya 2007 shows the improvement of students’ achievement at EF class, a mixed-level class where there were some differences of the students’ English proficiency. Another study of the implementation of tiered activities gave significant influences in improving student s’ involvement. It was held by Kurnia Ariyanti Solichah in her study of improving the writing learning process by using tiered tasks of eight grade students at SMP N 1 Ngemplak in the academic year of 20122013. This study tells about the role of tiered activities in the effort of engaging students’ attention to the English writing teaching and learning process.

C. Conceptual Framework

Article can be used to deliver information both online and in print. To write good article, writers should have good writing skills. In the contrary, the writing skills of the English article writers of PLUSWRITER Company as the participants were low. Based on the observation, interviews, and pre-test results, there were some problems that occurred in PLUSWRITER Company. One of the problems was related to different participants’ English proficiency level. Some of the participants wrote good articles with some complex sentences while some others did not. Some of the participants also did some mistakes in using subject- verb agreement, passive voice, parallelism, noun phrase, noun clause, punctuation, and reference. Some of them also wrote article with irrelevant content and title. In addition, participants did not know some mistakes they wrote. The researcher gave feedback only when they were not busy. Before giving feedback, the editors checked the articles first. They used an assessment rubric from the Company. They only checked the content, the use of grammar, and the technical writing. They did not have a clear assessment grading scale. In order to solve the problems, appropriate materials and activities for the participants were developed. The researcher also supported their writing skill improvement by checking the participants’ work and by giving them feedback. The materials and the activities were in accordance to the participants’ needs and