SKRIPSI --ROUNDTABLE TECHNIQUE--

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 30^th up to October 14^th 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.