ABSTRACT
TEACHING DESCRIPTIVE TEXT WRITING THROUGH ROUNDTABLE TECHNIQUE AT THE
FIRST YEAR OF SMA XAVERIUS PRINGSEWU
By
Ganis Suhesti
Writing is the
most complex skill for the students at the first year of SMA Xaverius
Pringsewu. Since in writing students have to consider many writing aspects,
such as content, organization, vocabulary, grammar and mechanics. The students mostly
complain that they do not know how to express their ideas into words and they
also have difficulty in how to compose sentences. As a result, the students
have no motivation to write, and it makes writing becomes a boring and hard
activity for them. Meanwhile, roundtable technique is one of cooperative
learning model where students work in groups and sit around the table. The most
convenient aspect is that students can cooperate through some procedures such
as writing, editing, and rewriting that can help them overcome their writing
difficulties.
Dealing with the
problems, this research aims to see whether roundtable technique can be applied
to increase the students’ writing ability in descriptive text at the first year
of SMA Xaverius Pringsewu. This research was a quantitative research and the
design was one-group pretest-posttest. It was conducted in five meetings in
Class X.3 of SMA Xaverius Pringsewu from September 30th up to
October 14th 2011. The instruments used to collect the data here
were writing pretest and posttest. In the pretest, they were asked to write
descriptive text of one member of their family. And, in the posttest, they had
to write a descriptive text of their favorite actors/actress. In order to
obtain a valid score, inter-rater and intra-rater reliability was used in this
research.
The result of
the tests shows that there is an increase from the mean of pretest to posttest
after being taught through roundtable technique. The students’ average score increases
from 63.88 to 70.69. The use of this technique also increases five aspects of
writing; content increases from 16.6 up to 18.34, organization 14.3 up to 16.34,
language use 14.65 up to 16.18, vocabulary 13.9 up to 15.4, and mechanic 4.08 up
to 4.41. The result of the hypothesis testing through SPSS Version 15 shows
that t-ratio (12.254) is much higher than the t–table (2.021) with the significance <
α. (0.000 < 0.05), it means
t-ratio > t-table. In other words, the hypothesis is accepted. Referring
to the result of the research above, it can be concluded that roundtable technique
can increase students’ writing ability in descriptive text.
