difficult words. If the students did not know the meaning of some English words or what was the English of some Indonesian words, they tended to ask the teacher.
Another difficulty found is related to the grammar mastery. Inability to use the correct auxiliary verb and how to use it in their sentence are two majors
difficulties found in relation to grammar mastery. In writing a short message, most of the students did not understand how to use auxiliary verb. Moreover, they often put
‘to be’ in the sentence that contained a full verb in their writings. The last difficulty faced by the students is the writing mechanic. In writing a
short message, the students made many errors in spelling and capitalization. In the pre-test, the students often misspelled the word, wrongly used the capitalization and
also wrongly used the punctuation such as full stop and comma. One of the factors why the students of SMPN 1 Pleret faced some difficulties
mentioned before is they lack of practice. It takes only 2X40 minutes in one meeting for a teacher to deliver the teaching and learning activity. During the meeting, the
teacher too much gave the students theories and she did not allocate enough time for students to practice their writing at class, so the students did not have an opportunity
to develop their writing skills, whereas practicing are very important. Practicing in writing was only given by the teacher as homework. When it became homework, the
students did it by themselves and the teacher did not guide them. Some of them might find a difficulty and be unmotivated. Therefore, they played with other friends
or opened Facebook Website to overcome their stress as the entertainment purpose. In conclusion, the writing learning process in this school still faced some
problems. The problems were related to the teaching technique, limited sources of
learning, uninteresting writing activities and lack of practices. Therefore, to improve the writing learning process, those problems must be solved.
C. Limitation of the Problem
It is impossible to deal with all problems that have been mentioned in the identification of the problem. It can be seen that there are many factors causing the
ineffective learning process. Due to my limitation, it is impossible to solve all problems related to the
writing learning process. In this research, the problem is focused only on the efforts to improve the practice and motivation in writing learning process of VIII grade
students at SMPN 1 Pleret in academic year 20142015 through the use of Facebook group.
D. Formulation of The Problem
Based on the explanation of the English teaching and learning problems that have been mentioned in the identification of the problems and based on the focus of
this study, the problem is formulated as follows: How can the writing learning process of VIII grade students of SMPN 1
Pleret in the academic year of 2014 2015 be improved through the use of Facebook group?
E. Objective of the Research
From the formulation of the problem, the objective of this research is to improve the students’ writing learning process in the VIII E class of SMP N 1 Pleret
in the academic year of 20142015.
F. Significance of the Research
I expect that this research gives some benefits to the following parties
1. English teachers The finding of this research can be a reference for other English
teachers in solving their problem on how to improve the writing learning process by using Facebook group.
2. Other researchers on the relevant study The result of this research can be used as the reference for other
researchers who want to do research on improving students’ writing learning process through Facebook group.
3. To English education students of Yogyakarta State University The finding of this research hopefully becomes one of the
considerable reading materials either to enrich their reference in writing their thesis or to improve their knowledge in English teaching and learning
process.
8
CHAPTER II LITERATURE REVIEW AND CONCEPTUAL FRAMEWORK
A. Theoretical Review
The current literature in the related themes in this section includes the reviews of writing and Facebook.
1. Writing
a. Definitions of Writing
There are many definitions of writing according to many language experts. Spratt et al. 2005:26 state that writing is a productive skill which involves
communicating a message by making signs on a page. According to Gordon in McDonald and McDonald 2002:7, writing is a process which different things
happen at different stages in the process of putting thoughts into words and words onto paper.
Writing can also be defined as both physical and mental activity that is aimed to express and impress Nunan, 2003:88. It is categorized as the physical activity
because the writer must act of committing words or ideas like typing an e-mail into a computer. As a mental work, the activities of writing focus more on the act of
inventing ideas, thinking about how to express and organize them into statements and paragraphs that enable a reader in understanding the ideas of the written work.
To complete the definition of writing proposed by Nunan, Brown 2001:335 also states that writing is the written products of thinking, drafting, and revising that
require specialized skills on how to generate ideas, how to organize them coherently,
