Action and Observation Cycle I

In the practice stage, the students were asked to fulfill incomplete mind mapping about a house. They should write down each room in a house and things they remember on each branch of the room. In this task, the researcher focused on knowing how far the students were able to mention nouns. In the next task, the students were also asked to do more specific task in pairs, they should answer the questions about the description of a house with correct sentences related to its colors and shapes. It was aimed to check whether the students were able to write sentences in English or not. In the end of the learning process of this meeting, the researcher conducted the pre-test to check students’ ability in writing descriptive texts. In the pre-test, the students were asked to write at least 10 sentences arranged in a text with the topic about a house. In this production stage, students found many difficulties in writing because they had limited abilities to write in a correct sentence and also most of them could not master many vocabularies about house. It can be seen in the following extract. When the researcher conducted the pre-test, many students seemed really confused. Many of them always asked the teacher about the vocabularies which they wanted to translate. They were not able to distinguish nouns, verbs, and adjectives. They also did not know how to make a correct sentence according to grammatical rules. For example, many of them did not know the use of auxiliary including To be Is, Am, Are and HasHave. In addition, they could not use simple present correctly. Dealing with punctuations, they also made many mistakes about that. They still did not know how to use capital letters and comma correctly. FN.04, March 18 th 2014 ____________________________________________________________ 58 Based on the pre-test, it showed that the students really lacked many abilities which are required in writing descriptive texts. Therefore, the researcher prepared explanation of auxiliary including To be and HasHave. He also prepared the explanation about nouns, and adjectives in the next two meetings along with some tasks to check their understanding. In addition, their knowledge about punctuations was still low because they made many mistakes in using it. So, their knowledge about it was also needed to be improved in the next meeting.

2. The Second Meeting

In the second meeting which was held on Monday 14 th April, the researcher provided same topic as the previous meeting. It was about a house. However, in this meeting, the students would be asked to give it a try to make a mind mapping for the first time. In the beginning, he opened the lesson with praying and checking students’ attendance. Then, he asked and checked their understanding related to what they learned in the previous meeting about the descriptive text including the social purpose, the generic structure and language features. The researcher asked “What is a descriptive text?” and the students answered “It is a text to describe something”. It indicated that they had understood the social purpose of the descriptive text. After that, the researcher re-explained the generic structure and the language features in order to recall their memories about what they had learned before. The researcher also explained more details about mind mapping to assure they would be ready to use it properly. 59