Table 4.8: Comparison among the Studen ts’ Scores throughout
the Research
PRE-TEST CYCLE I
CYCLE II POST-TEST
CONTENT
18.68 21.22
23.88 24.46
ORGANIZATION
15.32 16.98
17.20 17.77
VOCABULARY
15.72 15.91
16.32 16.91
LANGUAGE
15.72 16.72
17.59 17.70
MECHANICS
2.89 3.06
3.35 3.55
TOTAL SCORE
68.36 73.85
77.68 80.37
94
CHAPTER V CONCLUSIONS, IMPLICATIONS, AND SUGGESTIONS
A. Conclusions
The research findings and discussion in Chapter IV show that the writing skills of the eight grade students in SMPN 1 Rembang were improved through
the use of cue cards. In Cycle 1, the activities done were the use of cue cards to generate the students’ ideas, improving the students’ vocabulary mastery and
text organization, and enhancing the students’ motivation to learn English, especially in the classroom. Those activities gave an improvement in the
students’ writing skills. The improvement can be seen from the result of the students’ score in Cycle 1, the field notes from the observation, and the interview
with the English teacher and the students. The activities in Cycle II were the use of cue cards to generate the
students’ ideas, improving the students’ vocabulary mastery and text organization, and enhancing the students’ motivation to learn English. However,
there w ere two additional actions to make the students’ improvement more
optimal. The first action was using mini pictorial dictionary to improve the students’ vocabulary mastery and the second action was giving personal praise
to keep the students motivated in following the lesson. Those actions were added because of the result of the reflection in Cycle 1. It did show that there was
improvement in students’ vocabulary mastery and motivation. However, the change was not significant that the researcher wanted to take other actions.
According to the results of the students’ assessments, the students made an improvement in generating ideas, text organization and learning motivation.
Grammar and vocabulary were the two aspects of writing skills that the students were still lacking.
In Cycle II, it was found that cue cards could help the students to generate ideas, improve their vocabulary mastery, text organization, and enhance their
motivation. It was with the help of the actions done besides implementing cue cards as the teaching media, such as the careful selection of the pictures used for
the cue cards that were likely to suit the students’ interests in Cycle I and II, the use of table in Cycle I, the guiding questions asked to help the students with the
content of their texts in Cycle I and II, the use of a poster portraying people’s description in Cycle I, the use of a table in Cycle I, the use of mini pictorial
dictionary in Cycle II, and the giving of personal praise in Cycle II. The conclusions of the whole process of this research study and the
significances of the use of cue cards to impro ve the students’ writing ability are
given below: 1.
In the beginning of the research, the researcher did the reconnaissance stage by doing an observation, giving questionnaires about the students’
learning style preferences, and interviewing the students and the English teacher about the teaching and learning process in Class VIIID of SMPN
1 Rembang. The problems found in the reconnaissance stage were related to the students’ motivation to learn English, the media used to teach
writing, the students’ difficulties to generate ideas, the vocabulary
mastery and organization of the text, the students’ mindset that English
is a difficult subject, and the students’ grammar. Based on the data gained
and the discussion with the English teacher, several problems were chosen. They are the problems related to the studen
ts’ writing ability in generating ideas, text organization, vocabulary mastery, motivation, and
the media to teach writing. 2.
After the reconnaissance stage, the researcher and the teacher discussed the plan of actions to solve the problems chosen previously. There were
four lesson plans used in two cycles. In Cycle 1, there were three actions implemented through various attempts. The first one was generating the
s tudents’ idea through cue cards. The second action was improving the
students’ vocabulary mastery and ability to organize text. The third action was enhancing the students’ motivation to learn English. In Cycle
II, the researcher added 2 actions. Those were the use of mini pictorial dictionary to improve the students’ vocabulary mastery and giving
personal prise to keep the students motivated. In Cycle II, all of the pictures in the cue cards were taken from colourful cartoon films or
series. It was to make the students excited more in joining the activities in the classroom and to maintain their motivation throughout the
activities. The mini pictorial dictionary consisted of 60 verbs in the three verb forms. The intention of the use of the pictorial dictionary was to
improve the students’ vocabulary mastery, especially in verbs, since the text being learned at the time was recount text. The researcher did give
