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Table 3.1 Schedule of the Research
Time
December
2010 January
2011 February
2011 March
2011 April
2011
Activity
Identifying Problems
Fact Finding and Analysis
Planning I
Acting I Observing I
Reflecting I Planning II
Acting II Observing II
Reflecting II
B. The Subject of the Research
The subject of this research was the tenth grade students of X 1 class of SMA Negeri I Boyolali. This class consists of 10 boys and 22 girls.
Many students in class X 1 come from families that have good background knowledge in education. Almost all students’ economic lives are
above average. Therefore, we can find many students who bring notebooks with them in the Classroom. They use the notebooks either for teaching learning
process in classroom or for accessing the internet because the school has provided them with wireless for supporting teaching and learning process. With this
facilitates, they can access the internet with their notebook freely in the classroom for browsing the learning materials or just enjoying many facilities that are
offered by internet such as facebook, twitter, game online, blog, and the others.
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Almost all students in this class are smart and active. They come from favorite junior schools around Boyolali. They have high motivation to study and
enthusiasm toward technological development, especially in blog. For this research, the researcher chose this class as the subject. She had
some reasons. Firstly, she was a teacher apprentice in this school and had taught in this class; therefore she has been familiar with the class condition. Secondly, it
is a fact that almost all students of this class are smart and very active but have low achievement on writing. Thirdly, the allocated time to learn English writing
for the students is very limited; therefore, the students need alternative media can improve their writing. Finally, almost all students in this class have good
knowledge about blog, that is a media used in this research, that will help the researcher do this research well.
C. The Method of the Research
The method used in this research was the classroom action research. There are some definitions of action research. According to Wallace 1998: 4,
action research is basically a way of reflecting on a teacher’s teaching or teacher- training, or management of an English department, or whatever it is the teacher
does in ELT. It is done systematically by collecting data on teacher’s everyday practice and analyzing it in order to come to some decisions about what the
teacher’s future practice should be like. While Mills 2000: 6 defines action research as follows:
Action research is any systematic inquiry conducted by teacher, researcher, principals, school counselors, or other stakeholders in
teaching learning environment, to gather information about the ways that their particular schools operate, how they teach, and how
well their students learn.
Furthermore, Kemmis in Hopkins, 1993: 44 defines action research as follows:
Action research is a form of self-reflective enquiry undertaken by the participants in social including educational situation in order to
improve the rationality and justice of a their own social or educational practices, b their understanding of these practices, and
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c the situation in which the practices are carried out. It is most nationally empowering when undertaken by participants
collaboratively, though it is often undertaken by individuals, and sometimes in cooperation with ‘outsiders’.
Finally, Kemmis and Mc.Taggart 1988 in Nunan 1992: 17 state that there are three characteristics of action research. Firstly, the action research is
carried out by practitioners rather than outside researchers, secondly, the kind of the action research is collaborative, and thirdly, the action research is aimed at
changing things. It can be concluded that action research is a systematic study which is
done by the participants in social including educational situation to uncover effective ways for solving a specific problem for making a decision in order to
improve educational practice by means of their own practical action and by means of own reflection upon the effects of those action.
In this research, the classroom action research the researcher would conduct was aimed at overcoming the students’ problems in writing by
implementation of using blog effectively in and outside the classroom. Blog is used as the media in writing to communicate the others and access to the new
knowledge. Blog also has a feature to improve the mechanics of students’ writing. This classroom action research was carried out by the researcher collaboratively
with the teacher in the first grade students of SMA Negeri 1 Boyolali. The model of action research used in this research is one developed by
Kemmis and Mc Taggart in Burns, 1999: 32. According to them, classroom action research is composed of cycles each consisting of four steps namely:
planning, action, observation and reflections. Visually, the steps in action research by Kemmis and Mc Taggart in
Hopkins, 1993:48 can be illustrated as follows:
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D. The Procedures of the Research
