Grammar The Extent to which Scaffolding as an Instructional Strategy Helps Students

64

b. Grammar

After presenting the students’ progress on organizing the content of recount text, the researcher would like to show the extent to which scaffolding as an instructional strategy could help students learn grammar. Actually, from the first draft, most of the students got most of the use of grammar correctly. It shows that the type of scaffolding named offering explanation could build the students’ awareness in using simple past tense. However, in the first draft, there was no student who got all of the verbs 2 correctly in their stories. Nevertheless, after getting feedback from the tutor on the first draft, the students made some improvement in the second draft. The improvement was showed in the decreasing number of the misuse of verb 2. Student 23 showed t he proof. In Student 23’s writing, the student used 52 verbs 2. However, the student made mistakes on the 7 of 52 verbs 2. It meant that the student could use 45 verbs 2 correctly. Getting 45 correct use of verb 2 means that the student could use more than a half of the number of verb 2 correctly. Furthermore, finding mistakes in the student 23’s first draft, the tutor gave the student another type of scaffolding named verifying and clarifying students’ understanding. The tutor then gave some feedback on the use of past tense and some explanations related to the mistakes. Then, in the second draft, the student did not make the same error anymore. The following table shows Student 23’s first and second draft. The first draft column shows the mistaken use of verb tense by Student 23, whereas the second draft column showed the improved version of the same sentences. 65 Std First Draft Second Draft 23 My big family come one by one. My big family came one by one. I thought it is my dream. I thought it was my dream. But when I get up, I could not raise my hands. But when I got up, I could not raise my hands. I come to her. I came to her. Not too long, any people one by one sleeped. Not too long after that, people one by one slept . Many people come together to look sunrise. Many people came together to look sunrise. We come back to parking bus area by jeep. We came back to parking bus area by jeep. In the first draft, the student wrote six verbs in present form and one verb in incorrect form of verb 2. Finding those mistakes, the tutor gave the student feedback by marking the mistaken verbs and giving oral explanation on why they were incorrect. The explanation given by the tutor was meant to bring the students back to the right way of writing the recount text. In other words, the explanation aimed to maintain the pursuit of the learning goal, namely writing recount text correctly. After receiving tutor’s feedback, the student became aware of and attentive to the previous errors and tried not to make the same errors again. In the second draft, most of the students got fewer errors than the first and the second writing. Then, in the third draft, the students got fewer errors than in the first and second draft. For example, after the feedback on the first draft, Student 23 did not get even one mistake in the second and third draft. Another example is Student 26. In the first draft, the student got 13 errors. Then, after getting feedback from the tutors, the student got fewer errors in the second draft, which is 10 errors. From the decreasing number of error, it can be seen that the students were moving to the better level. As Table 4.4 Student 23’s Sentences Written in First and Second Draft 66 the students got fewer errors, they could build their awareness on the use of past tense and thus could produce better writing. The stud ents’ increasing awareness and attentiveness on the use of correct grammar are supported by score difference between the students’ pre and post scaffolding learning writing products. In the post scaffolding learning writing products, the students’ average score on the use of correct grammar is 2.5 points higher than their former average score. The detailed scoring is presented in Appendix 13.Eventually, as the students moved to the higher level of understanding, the tutor gradually withdrew the assistance in the learning process.

c. Vocabulary