Related Studies LITERATURE REVIEW AND CONCEPTUAL FRAMEWORK

above, it can be inferred that cue cards can be used as the media in teaching writing to improve the students writing skills, especially the ones that are related to the process of generating ideas content, vocabulary mastery and organization of the text, and motivation. Cue cards can solve the students problem in generating ideas because it also involves the use of pictures in the process of writing. Pictures are effective as media to teach writing since it offers an input in order to stimulate the students mind and attract their attention to the text that is going to be taught. Furthermore, by using pictures, the students will be able to have clearer visualization on what they will write. It also provides a good basis for the writing tasks where the students can analyse their methods in organizing ideas they got from the pictures. As mentioned earlier, pictures in cue cards offer some advantages in teaching writing. Pictures also help the students in generating ideas. It is because a picture is better than a thousand words. Undoubtedly, pictures are powerful visual aids. Pictures here include everything ranging from postcards, drawing, photographs, paintings, wall pictures and slidesvideos Chayanuvat, 1996. Moreover, pictures in cue cards can also help the students in improving their vocabulary mastery and organization of the text. The reason is because the activities done using cue cards can be done in groups. By cooperating with their peers, the students will gain more confidence in doing the writing activity. By doing the cooperative work, the students are also able to share their knowledge that they will eventually gain the ability in the two aspects. According to Raimes 1983:27, with a picture, the students will need to use appropriate vocabulary and sentence structure to discuss what they see. In this context, the students will need to use English words to write their ideas of what they see. So, pictures are valuable in that they provide for the use of vocabulary items and language forms. In cue cards with the presence of pictures, the teacher can also explain the organization of the text more easily, no matter whether it is in the form of single picture or a series of pictures. In the form of single picture, the researcher had put some key words about the general information of the subject that could be used in the orientation part of a descriptive text in Cycle I. Other than that, the reseacher also separated certain topic in several pictures so that the students would focus on aparticular topic in a paragraph. In Cycle II, where the students were taught recount text with cue cards in the form of series of pictures, the researcher discussed each picture with the students first to figure which ones went to the orientation part, which ones went to the events part, and the others which belonged to the re-orientation part. Therefore, based on the explanation above, it can be concluded that teaching writing with cue cards can improve the writing ability of class VIII of SMPN 1 Rembang, especially in the aspects of generating ideas, vocabulary mastery and text organization, and motivation.