87
lacking on the linguistic
accuracy. much as they could
not learn fully implicitly.
b. Students applied
writing conventions well.
easier to learn, especially about
grammar, so that they could
improve their writing.
b. The students’
writing improved in terms of
linguistic accuracy.
4 Students
attitude Students tended
to treat the teacher
indifferently and sometimes made
fun of her. They preferred to talk
with their friends or playing with
their gadgets during the lesson.
The students became more respected the
researcher as their teacher well.
The students respected the
researcher as their teacher well. They
asked questions in respectable manner
and paid attention more.
D. Discussion
The aim of applying the board games discussed in this thesis is to improve students’ writing skills. The researcher observed the situations trying to find the
problems and looked for the possible explanations of these from experts’ studies before making planning for the actions. As the researcher found that the students’
main weakness was on their lack of grammar awareness while writing, the researcher tried to find the source of the problem which was found in Nik et. al.’s explanation
which states that to be an effective writer, we need to master skills of writing readiness and grammatical rules 2010: 1. From here the researcher was convinced
that writing indeed needs grammatical knowledge. In order to improve students’ writing, teachers should also consider improving the grammatical awareness of the
students. However, teaching teenagers might be different with teaching adult
88
students. According to Lauria de Gentile Leiguarda de Orue 2012: 17, teaching teenagers has special matters to be considered such as their needs to play and social
interaction, their needs to rest, their need for physical activity, and their needs to learn in a stress-reduced environment. From this theory, the researcher tried to look
for an activity that enables students to learn writing in a way that covers all the needs mentioned. The activity has to be fun enough to make them relaxed and interact with
their classmates, but also provides practice to learn to write. The researcher then decided to apply games to the teaching and learning activity, as games are effective
to increase motivation, to lower student’s stress, and to give opportunity for real communication. Another thing for consideration is that we are rarely aware that
writing is not done in an instant process. While writing, we at least need four steps that are planning, drafting, editing, and final version Harmer, 2004: 4. Students are
usually asked to write without given an opportunity to revise their work. This inspired the researcher to conduct an activity that enabled students to edit their
writing before submitting.
90
CHAPTER V CONCLUSIONS, IMPLICATIONS, AND SUGGESTIONS
A. Conclusions
The research was aimed to improve students’ writing skills through board games, conducted in class X-3 of SMA N 1 Pengasih and begun with the researcher did an
observation in the teaching and learning process and interviewed the English teacher. The results from the English tests during PPL were also taken as considerations.
From the data collected, the researcher found many problems occuring during the English teaching and learning process. The problems were then selected to later be
solved. They we re students’ low writing skills and motivation in learning, the
monotonous class, and the lack media usage during the teaching and learning process. The researcher decided to solve the problems with board games. The research was
done in two cycles, conducted from October 30
th
to November 27
th
, 2014. In cycle 1, the teaching was done following
genre based approach’s learning cycle. The board game was applied in the stage of Independent Construction of the
Text where it was used as editing stage of the students’ writing draft. The students
played the games and did discussions in groups. However, some groups did not do maximally as they did not feel comfortable being in the group with classmates they
did not get along with. That, along with their inability to find the mistakes of the sentences the researcher provided as the tasks, made the results of this cycle not as
good as expected. However, since the students claimed that they enjoyed learning with this game, the researcher decided to keep using this game as the method to
improve their writing skills.
