75 writing through classroom discussion. Due to the limitation of time, the researcher
asked collaborator’s help in giving feedback and helping the students to revise their writing.
After the implementation of the actions in Cycle 1, the students had improved their writing skills dealing with content, organization, vocabulary,
language use, and mechanics. Although the result of their writing in pre-test stage was better than their result of writing in post-test Cycle 1, many students still
faced the problems in constructing sentences and they still had limited vocabulary range. They literally translated the words from Indonesian into English. In
addition, some students still had frequent errors in punctuation, capitalization and spelling.
Figure 7:
The result of a student’s writing in post-test 1
76
Figure 8: The result of a student’s writing in post-test 1
4. Findings of Cycle 1
After implementing the actions, the researcher conducted a post-test to measure students’ progress. The researcher adopted writing scoring rubric
proposed by Jacob s et al. in Weigle 2002: 116. The students’ post-test mean
score in each aspect in Cycle 1 was presented in the table below.
Table 9: Post-test mean score of each writing aspect in Cycle 1 Mean
C O
V LU
M Total
19.04 12.61
11.83 13.73
2.78 59.99
C: Content O: Organization
V: Vocabulary LU: Language Use M: Mechanics
Based on the reflection and the result students’ post-test of Cycle 1, it can
be concluded that there were some successful and unsuccessful effects of each actions in Cycle 1. Those are described below.
77
a. Using picture series as the media
The use of picture series as the media successfully increased the students’
interest in learning writing. Picture series also helped the students in generating and developing their idea. However, their writing content was still below the
expectation since they still had limited supporting ideas in their writing.
b. Providing grammar exercise
A varied activity of learning was applied by providing the students with combined exercises with picture series and game. Combining grammar exercise
and game successfully improved the students’ interest in learning, although some obstacles appeared. The students only focused on playing the game, instead of
learning the material. It caused their grammar mastery was not successfully improved. It also consumed too much time to discuss the material and give
feedback to the students. Moreover, based on the students’ writing production in
post-test, it could be seen that they still made errors and mistakes in subject and verb agreement, capitalization, punctuation, and determining the change of verb
from present form into past form, especially irregular verb. However, this action should be implemented in the next cycle since the students’ still had inadequate
grammar mastery.
c. Providing vocabulary exercise
