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Additionally, Blog is an alternative way of communicating among teacher and students and encourage the students to become autonomous learners, thus it can be
prompted as a reflecting tools of the learning process Mynard, 2007.
D. Student Blog in Improving Writing Skills
The current curriculum in primary high school requires that the students should be able to use the English at the functional level. It means that they can
communicate in both spoken and written form to solve daily activities. Nevertheless, their skills, especially writing, are not improved yet since they
rarely practice it in real communication. Regarding to the way of communication nowadays, students will be asked more to use technology. In the classroom,
students can now access the internet easily. They dont have to set a certain time to go to the internet cafe. This facility provided by school, actually, can promote
the learning process through the use of ICT since it will motivate the students. An alternative use of ICT is utilizing blogs to teach writing. Blogs serve
the real situation for writing class and provide more space for practices. When students are asked to publish their writing since the first instruction, it is hoped
that they will be motivated to do best. Besides, blogs are completed with the features which consist of formatting and editing toolbar. Those features may help
students in editing their works. In addition, teacher can give comments on students blog as a direct feedback, therefore students know about their skill.
Outside the class, students are also allowed to write the other personal intensions to their blog. When the students enjoy the learning, it will promote the learning
process to gain success.
E. Action Hypothesis
Based on the theories and rationale above, the hypothesis is formulated as follows: student blogs can improve the students writing skill.
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CHAPTER III RESEARCH METHODOLOGY
The research in this paper was conducted by adopting the principles of Action Research to investigate the problem, find out the solution, and note the
changes of condition which are related to the students’ writing skill and classroom situation. This third chapter presents the methodology of the research starting
from the beginning until the end of it. It contains the context of the research, method of the research, technique of collecting and analysing the data. The more
detail explanation will be presented in the following sections.
A. Context of the Research
1. The Setting of the Research
The research was carried out in SMP Negeri 1 Wonogiri. It is located on Jln. Kepodang V Wonogiri 57611. This school has become a school of RSBI
since three years ago. Not all of the students in this school belong to RSBI class. Some of them are students of acceleration class. This school already uses the
curriculum of Kurikulum Tingkat Satuan Pendidikan KTSP as the basic teaching and learning processes. According to the the Government Regulation No.
192005, KTSP is operational curriculum which is created by and carried out in each level of education. It means that the school creates its own curriculum
including the plan, purpose, content, learning material, and the procedures as a guide in order to achieve certain target of education.
The research was conducted in the first semester in the second grade students of academic year 20102011. It was on August 2010 until January 2011.
The time setting includes the preparation stage up to the reporting stage as stated in the following table.
