IMPROVING STUDENTS WRITING SKILL USING SINGLE SLOT SUBSTITUTION DRILL TECHNIQUE (A

IMPROVING STUDENTS WRITING SKILL USING SINGLE SLOT SUBSTITUTION DRILL TECHNIQUE (A Classroom Action Research at the Seventh Grade of SMP Negeri 17 Surakarta in 2014/ 2015 Academic Year) By: Lavenia Pratama Sumardiono ABSTRACT The aims of the study are to find out and to describe whether using of Single Slot Substitution Drill Technique improves students writing skill at the seventh grade students of SMP Negeri 17 Surakarta. The method used in this research was an Classroom Action Research. The researcher conducted the research in two cycles at VII C of SMP Negeri 17 Surakarta from April to June 2015. In collecting the data, the researcher used observation, interview, field note, and test (pre test and post test). In analyzing the data, t test formula was employed to calculate the mean score of pre test and post test. The research findings show that the use of Single Slot Substitution Drill Technique can improve the students writing skill. The improvements of the students can be seen from the followings: (1) the students are able to develop their ideas in making a good descriptive text; (2) the students are able to use correct grammar of simple present tense; (3) the students can use the correct spelling and punctuation; and (4) help the students to get more new vocabularies from the cue that was given by the researcher. Besides, the improvement of the students writing skill can be seen from the improvement of the mean score of pre test (45.2), post test one (62.1) and post test two (76.3). The class condition had also improved. The improvement of class condition includes: (1) the students participation are better, (2) the students are more active and enthusiastic during the teaching learning process, (3) the students pay more attention and more focus on the activities during the teaching learning process. In conclusion, Single Slot Substitution Drill Technique can improve students writing skill and the condition in the classroom. Key words: Writing Skill, Classroom Action Research, Single Slot Substitution Drill Technique. 1

MENINGKATKAN KEMAMPUAN MENULIS SISWA MENGGUNAKAN TEKNIK SINGLE SLOT SUBSTITUTION DRILL (Penelitian Tindakan Kelas pada Kelas Tujuh SMP Negeri 17 Surakarta Tahun Ajaran 2014/ 2015) Oleh: Lavenia Pratama Sumardiono ABSTRAK Tujuan dari penelitian ini adalah untuk mengetahui dan mendiskripsikan apakah penggunaan teknik Single Slot Substitution Drill dapat meningkatkan kemampuan siswa pada kelas tujuh SMP Negeri 17 Surakarta. Metode yang digunakan dalam penelitian ini adalah penelitian tindakan kelas.peneliti melaksanakan penelitian dengan dua siklus pada kelas VII C SMP Negeri 17 Surakarta dari April sampai Juni 2015. Pada tahapan mengumpulkan data, peneliti menggunakan observasi, wawancara, catatan lapangan, dan tes (pre-test dan post-test). Untuk menganalisa data, formula t-test digunakan untuk menjumlah nilai rata-rata dari pre-test dan post-test. Temuan penelitian menunjukkan bahwa penggunaan teknik Single Slot Substitution Drill dapat meningkatkan kemampuan menulis siswa. Peningkatan siswa dapat dilihat dari data berikut: (1) siswa mampu untuk mengembangkan ide mereka dalam membuat teks deskriptif yang baik; (2) siswa mampu untuk menggunakan tata bahasa yang benar pada tenses simple present tense; (3) siswa dapat menggunakan ejaan dan tanda baca yang benar dan (4) membantu siswa untuk mendapatkan perbendaharaan kata dari isyarat yang diberikan oleh peneliti. Selain itu, peningkatan kemampuan menulis siswa dapat dilihat dari peningkatan nilai rata-rata dari pre-test (45.2), post-test pertama (62.1) dan post-test kedua (76.3). Kondisi kelas juga meningkat. Peningkatan kondisi kelas mencakup: (1) Partisipasi siswa menjadi lebih baik, (2) siswa lebih aktif dan antusias selama proses belajar dan mengajar, (3) siswa menjadi lebih perhatian dan lebih fokus selama proses belajar dan mengajar. Kesimpulannya, bahwa teknik Single Slot Substitution Drill dapat meningkatkan kemampuan menulis siswa dan kondisi dalam kelas. Key words: Kemampuan Menulis, Penelitian Tindakan Kelas, Teknik Single Slot Substitution Drill. 2

A. INTRODUCTION English is one of international language that used in worldwide. English has grown in the last few decades quickly. Ricard and Rogers (1986: 1) say, Whereas today English is the world s most widely studied foreign language. It can be concluded that English becomes a mother tongue for many people in the world. Indonesia as one of the developing country has also set its educational curriculum which includes the teaching of English as a foreign language. It is one of compulsory subject studied from junior and senior high school up to the university. In junior high school, English becomes a compulsory subject to be taught. As the 2013 curriculum states: Mata pelajaran umum Kelompok A sebagaimana dimaksud pada ayat (1) huruf a terdiri atas: (a) Pendidikan Agama dan Budi Pekerti (b) Pendidikan Pancasila dan Kewarganegaraan (c) Bahasa Indonesia (d) Matematika (e) Ilmu Pengetahuan Alam (f) Ilmu Pengetahuan Sosial dan (g) Bahasa Inggris. Regulation of Ministry of National Education No. 22 Year 2006 said that teaching English in junior high school in Indonesia covers three main scopes. First, discourse competence, include understanding and creating short functional text both spoken and written in four skills, listening, speaking, reading, and writing. Second, understanding competence, that is a competency in understanding and creating short functional text in a form of procedure, descriptive, recount, narrative, and report. Lastly, secondary competence which consists of linguistics competence (using grammar, vocabulary, phonetics), socio-cultural competence (using expressions in a context of communication), strategic competence (solving problems in a communication process), and forming discourse competence (using tools to form discourse). 3

English has four skills that have to be learned by the students. They are writing, speaking, reading and listening. The most important of English skills are speaking and writing like Alexander (1975: 8) said that speaking and writing are the most important of these skills, since to some extent they presuppose the other two. From those statements, the researcher focuses on writing skill because writing as a productive skill it aims at assisting students in expressing their main idea.according to Raimes (1983: 3), : First, writing reinforces the grammatical structures, idioms, and vocabulary that we have been teaching our students. Second, when our students write, they also have a chance to be adventurous with the language, to go beyond what they have just learned to say, to take risks. Third, when they write, they necessarily become very involved with the language; Based on the pre-observation in SMP Negeri 17 Surakarta, the researcher found that the minumum score (KKM) of English is 72. It is high for the students at first grade in junior high school. The researcher found some problems in learning English especially in writing. First, they felt afraid if they made mistakes in writing. Second, they did not know what to write in their text.third, they did not understand about the basic structure of English sentence. Last, they had a low participation and motivation in learning English. There were several points caused of the problems such as: they had a lack of vocabulary so they got difficulties to express their idea in written text. The teacher did not give understanding about the basic structure of English sentence so the students were getting confused about the material. Their knowledge about grammar was low, so they were unable to differ noun, verb, adjective and so on. On the other hand, the class was very crowded so the students were not focused to the teacher when they had English class. 4

From the facts above, in this research, the researcher proposed the way of teaching writing by using Single Slot Substitution Drill Technique. Single Slot Substitution Drill is one kind of drill techniques is used in audio-lingual method. The major purpose of single slot substitution drill is to give the students practice in finding and filling in the slots of a sentence (Larsen-Freeman, 2000: 48). In Single Slot Substitution Drill, the students will repeat a sentence from the dialog and replace a word or phrase in the sentence with the word or phrase the teacher gives them. This word or phrase is called the cue (Larsen- Freeman, 2000: 37). The research aims are: (1) To find whether Single Slot Substitution Drill Technique to improve students writing skill at the seventh grade students of SMP Negeri 17 Surakarta in the 2014/2015 academic year. (2) To find how far is Single Slot Substitution Drill Technique to improve students writing skill at the seventh grade students of SMP Negeri 17 Surakarta in the 2014/2015 academic year. B. RESEARCH METHODOLOGY This classroom action research used seventh grade students of SMP Negeri 17 Surakarta in 2014/2015 academic year. The school is located at Jl. Jenderal Ahmad Yani, Sumber, Banjarsari, Surakarta. The research was conducted in three months from April 2015 until June 2015. The subject of the research was the seventh grade students of SMP Negeri 17 Surakarta 2014/2015 academic year. This research, the researcher used class VII C as 5

subject of the research. This class consists of 34 students. The researcher chose this class because the writing skill was low. Most of them had difficulties in writing process. They had a lack of vocabularies, did not understand about the basic structure of English sentence, and they were still confused to differ verb, noun, adjective, adverb or others. In this research, the researcher used the classroom action research. Pelton (2010: 7) states that action research is a model for teaching with high transparency that enables teachers to determine student achievement on a daily basis rather than waiting for the end of a quarter. According to Elliot (1993) in Somekh (2006: 13), action research is a process whereby, through the collection and interpretation of data, in the light of personal reflection and self-evaluation, individuals can establish situational understanding, as the basis for action which integrates practical aims with moral understanding. Moreover, Burns (2010: 2) says: Action research is part of a broad movement that has been going on in education generally for some time. It is related to the ideas of reflective practice and the teacher as researcher. Action research involves taking a self-reflective, critical, and systematic approach to exploring your own teaching contexts. The procedures of this classroom action research were identifying the problems or issues, planning, implementing the action, observing, reflecting, revising the plan, and giving assessment. The researcher conducted two cycles in this research and used scoring rubric to give score in students work. In this research, the researcher used test and non-test to collecting the data. Test are pre-test and post-test. The non-test is collect from observation, interview, 6

and document (photographs, lesson plan, and list of students test). In this research, the researcher used qualitative and quantitative data analysis to analyze the data. 1. Qualitative Data Analysis The qualitative model for analysis data according to Miles and Huberman in Hopkins (2008: 138-139) are: (a) Data Collection, refers to the process of collecting the data from field notes, observation sheets, and interview. (b) Data Reduction, refers to the process of selecting, focusing, amplifying, abstracting, and transforming the data that appear in written up field notes and continuous until a final report is complete. (c) Data Display, display is an organized assembly of information that permits conclusion drawing and action taking. (d) Conclusion Drawing or Verification, cconclusion drawing involves stepping back to consider what the analyzed data mean and to assess their implications for the questions at hand. Verification, integrally linked to conclusion drawing, entails revisiting the data as necessary to cross-check or verifies these emergent conclusions. In this step, the data, which have been displayed and linked, was checked again to see systematic patterns and interrelationships between the data. The data were analyzed to make conclusion. 2. Quantitative Data Analysis The quantitative data was used to analyze the data from the result of writing test. The result of the test is analyzed using non-independent t-test. 7

C. RESULT This research was conducted by using a classroom action research, it consisted of two cycles. Each cycles consisted of three meetings. It was conducted in class VII C of SMP Negeri 17 Surakarta in 2014/2015 academic year. During the action, the researcher, Lavenia Pratama (LP) was helped by Mr. Muhammad Fauzan P., S.Pd (MFP) as the collaborator. This research was conducted in April 2015 until June 2015. Before conducting the study, the researcher conducted the pretest which was held on April 30 th, 2015. The kind of pre test was written test. There was one test item in the form of instruction to write a descriptive text about theirselves. The students only got 45.2 for the mean score of writing. It means that the students writing skill was very low. The researcher implemented the action in three meeting in each cycle. Two meetings were for learning process then one meeting was for post-test one. The first meeting of cycle one was conducted on Tuesday, May 12 nd 2015. The second meeting of cycle one was conducted on Tuesday, May 19 th 2015. The post test 1 was given on Tuesday, May 26 th, 2015. After observing and reflecting the action, the researcher found several strengths and weaknesses. The strengths were: (1) Single Slot Substitution Drill Technique was successful to improve the students writing skill. It can be seen from the result of post-test I. The mean score of pre-test was 45.2 and after implementing Single Slot Substitution Drill Technique, they got 62.1 for the mean score of post-test I. (2) The English learning process was more attractive. (3) The 8

students felt easier to make sentence using Single Slot Substitution Drill Technique. The weaknesses were: (1) The students did not pay attention to the rules of simple present tense especially in using has/have and s/es. (2) Most of the students had difficulty in vocabulary mastery. (3) Some students were passive in English learning process. (4) The students still cheated their classmates s work. The researcher revised plan for the cycle two to solve the problems that happened in cycle one. The researcher made lesson plan and would give post test at the end of cycle two. In cycle two, the researcher would give a detail explanation about descriptive text and the grammar of simple present tense. She would give a interested example of descriptive so the students could enjoy the English learning process using Single Slot Substitution Drill Technique. The second cycle was conducted on Saturday, May 30 th 2015 and Tuesday, June 9 th 2015. Post test two was held on Saturday, June 13 rd 2015. After observing and reflecting the action, the researcher found that there were some improvements in the cycle two. They were as follow: (1) the students motivation in writing learning process was increase. The students were more active and enthusiastic during the English learning process. They looked enjoyed the learning using Single Slot Substitution Drill Technique. They were also brave to share their ideas in making descriptive text or to answer the researcher s question. (2) the students s progress in mastery descriptive text was also increase. The students made a few mistakes in punctuation and spelling. They also did not have difficulties anymore in making sentences. (3) Single Slot Substitution Drill Technique was success to improve the students writing skill. It can be seen from the result of post test II. The mean score of 9

post test II was 76.3 while the mean score of post test I was 62.1. It mean that there was improvement than previous cycle. D. DISCUSSION After giving the technique in teaching and learning process using Single Slot Substitution Drill Technique, there were any improvements on the students. The result showed that Single Slot Substitution Drill Technique can improve students score. It could be seen from the score of post test II. The mean score was better than post test I. The mean score of post test II was 76.3 while the mean score of post test I was 62.1. It mean that the students had good improvement and their writing skill was increase. The students also achieved Kriteria Ketuntasan Minimal (KKM) score by using Single Slot Substitution Drill Technique. Single Slot Substitution Drill Technique also improve another aspects of writing. First, getting vocabulary. The students get more new vocabularies using Single Slot Substitution Drill Technique by the cues that was given by the researcher. Second, using correct grammar. In descriptive text, the tense is simple present tense. Single Slot Substitution Drill Technique helps the students to apply the using of simple present tense more easy in making descriptive text. Last, using correct mechanism. Single Slot Substitution Drill Technique helps the students more aware about punctuation and spelling. 10

The researcher also found that Single Slot Subtitution Drill Technique had strengths. Single Slot Subtitution Drill Technique was a technique that could help the students to develop their ideas in making a good descriptive text. This technique could help the students to use correct grammar of simple present tense like Mart (2013: 64) said that this technique required learners to use the structure accurately through repetition. This technique also could help the students to get more new vocabularies from the cue that was given by the researcher. It was supported by Bruder and Paulston (1973: 141) that this method lead the students to teaching new vocabularies. From the discussion above, the researcher concluded that Single Slot Substitution Drill Technique was the effective technique to help the students to improve their writing skill especially in VII C of SMP Negeri 17 Surakarta. This technique can improve the students English skill there like their vocabulary, grammar, mechanism, content and organization. 11

E. CONCLUSION and SUGGESTION a) Conclusion Based on the result of research finding, the conclusion can be drawn that Single Slot Substitution Drill Technique can improve students writing skill, especially in descriptive text. It was viewed from conclusions of answering problem statements of this research as follows: 1. Single Slot Substitution Drill Technique can improve the students writing skill of seventh grade students of SMP Negeri 17 Surakarta. It can be seen from the result of mean score before and after implementating the action through pre test and post test. The mean score of pre test is 45.2 and it increases became 62.1 in post test I. And then, it increases more better became 76.3 in post test II. The scores of all test involves five elements, there are content, organization, grammar, vocabulary, and mechanism. 2. Single Slot Substitution Drill Technique also can make the class VII C of SMP Negeri 17 Surakarta better. When the researcher asked the students to substitute the cue in a sentence, they made quick response to answer it. They were brave to share their ideas in making descriptive text. The students looked more active and not ashamed to ask questions to the researcher. They were also interested in learning descriptive text using Single Slot Substitution Drill Technique. 12

b) Suggestion Based on the result above, the researcher like to offer the suggestions. The suggestions will be useful for teachers, students and other researchers. The suggestions as follows: 1. For the English teacher In teaching learning process, teachers need an interesting technique to eliminate the students boredom during the lesson and attract them to be interested in teaching learning process. Single Slot Substitution Drill Technique can be used as one alternative technique in teaching writing descriptive text. The teacher should be able give more attention and interested material to the students in teaching writing. Furthermore, the teacher always keeps the students motivation and always be a good model for them. 2. For the students The students should keep on motivating and developing what they have already reached in learning writing. They should practice Single Slot Substitution Drill Technique in order to improve their writing skill especially in learning descriptive text. By using Single Slot Substitution Drill Technique, they can also improve their vocabulary mastery. 13

3. For the other researchers This research can be used as a reference and be the alternative guidance in conducting the same study of obtaining the better result. Besides that substitution drills can be applied not only for writing skill but also for teaching the other skill. Moreover, future researchers should maximize the use of Single Slot Substitution Drill Technique in teaching learning process. BIBLIOGRAPHY Ary, Donald, et al. 2010. Introduction to Research in Education. (8 th ed). United States: Wadsworth. Burns, Anne. 2009. Doing Action Research in English Language Teaching. New York: Routledge. Hopkins, D. 2008. A Teacher's Guide to Classroom Research (4 th ed). New York: Open University Press. Larsen-Freeman, Diane. 2000. Techniques and Principles in Language Teaching. Oxford: Oxford University Press. LG, Alexander. 1975. Practice and Progress. London: Longman. Pelton, Robert P. 2010. Action Research for Teachers Candidates: Using Classroom Data to Enchance. America: Rowman & Littlefield Education. 14

Richards Jack C. and Theodore S. Rodgers. 1986. Approaches and Methods in Language Teaching. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Somekh, Henry. 2006. Action Research: a Methodology for Change and Development. England: Open University Press. 15