IMPROVING THE STUDENTS’ ABILTY IN WRITING DESCRIPTIVE TEXTS THROUGH COLLABORATIVE WRITING TECHNIQUE

Abstract

Writing is one of the four skills-listening, speaking, reading, and writing-that plays an important role in a daily international communication. It is estimated that 75% of all international communication is in writing, 80% of all international information is the world's computers, and 90% of internet contents are in English. This can be seen in the development of email, facsimile, short message service (SMS) via a mobile phone as increasingly popular forms of communication. Most developed and developing countries use them as a medium for transferring information and technology from one to another. Moreover, there are many books, magazines, and newspaper written in English. Since English has great importance in daily interpersonal communication , Indonesia, as a developing country , does not have much choice other than to teach students to be able to write in English. The mastery of writing is used for preparing students to acquire knowledge and technology in the globalization era. Based on 2006 School Based Curriculum (KTSP) writing is one of the obligatory language skills. The teaching of writing is aimed at enabling students to master the functional texts and monologue texts or paragraphs in the form of descriptive, narrative, recount, procedure, and report (Depdiknas, 2006). The work of writing is presented in the form of text types, usually known as genres, which are closely related to the purpose of each type. For especially the eighth grade, it is limited on descriptive, recount, and narrative. In writing descriptive text, the eighth grade students are expected to be able to write a simple descriptive text correctly. They should be able to make sentences in the form of present tense and develop main idea into short descriptive text. Abstract: The main objectives of the study to improve the students' ability in writing descriptive texts and know the strengths and weaknesses of the implementation of collaborative writing technique in improving students' writing ability of descriptive texts. The Classroom Action Research was employed in this study. The subject of the study was 28 of eighth grade students of the SMP Negeri 1 Pelaihari in the Academic Year of 2011/2012. This action research was conducted in two cycles. Each consisted of planning, implementing , observing, and reflecting the action. In collecting the data, the data are obtained from the questionnaire, interview, and observation and also from the writing tests. The result of this study shows that collaborative writing technique can improve the students' ability in writing descriptive texts. This is proved by the significant increase of the mean score of the post-test cycle 1 and post-test cycle 2. Besides, the students have become more motivated to study English especially in writing.