Reliability of the Data

unsuccessful actions. She added some exercises in vocabulary and sentence structure. She also decreased the number of comprehension questions and gave more allocation time to language based exercises. 2. Action After completing the planning, the researcher started to implement the guided writing in the teaching and learning process. She began to teach with the new lesson plan that had been made. 3. Observation Observation was conducted during the teaching and learning process in order to know the effectiveness of the learning process and whether the technique could improve students’ achievements or not. It also aimed to know whether the plan gave significant changes or not. She still invited the collaborators to observe the teaching and learning process and also gave their comments or suggestions to the action. 4. Reflection After the observation, the researcher made reflection and evaluated the action of implementing guided writing in the teaching and learning process. She also described the effect of the action in order to make sense of what had happened. She also compared successful and unsuccessful actions between Cycle 1 and Cycle 2. The findings in each meeting and the results of the test were considered as the input to improve the result of the next cycle. However, there was no more time to conduct the next cycle. Therefore, she and the teacher decided to end this research after conducting Cycle 2. 37

CHAPTER IV RESEARCH FINDINGS AND DISCUSSION

A. Reconnaissance

Identifying the problems is the first step in conducting action research. To identify the field problems the researcher conducted some activities. First, the research was started by identifying the problems in the classroom. Class observation was conducted to know the teaching and learning process. Second, interviews were also conducted to both students and the teacher. Those were conducted to gain more information related to the teaching and learning process and their writing problems. Third, a pretest was conducted to measure their writing skills. Generally, it was found that their writing skills were still low. They had several problems in writing. The first problem faced by students was content. They had difficulty in developing ideas they wanted to write. In the pretest, they were given 40 minutes to write their favorite narrative texts especially a fable in at least three paragraphs. During the test, most of them were confused and were not confident to write. In the first ten minutes, most of their worksheets were still blank. They did not get ideas in a flash of inspiration. They could not express their ideas and thoughts freely. As a result, most of their stories were not finished yet. It was because they lacked vocabulary and they were afraid of making mistakes dealing with the sentence structure.