Improving the Ability of the Students of English Education Study Program of FKIP Tadulako University in Writing Paragraphs through the Process-Based Approach. (Thesis)
| Main Author: | Budi Budi |
|---|---|
| Format: | PeerReviewed |
| Bahasa: | ind |
| Terbitan: |
, 2009
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| Subjects: | |
| Online Access: |
http://karya-ilmiah.um.ac.id/index.php/disertasi/article/view/1576 |
Daftar Isi:
- Based on the researcher's experiences in teaching writing paragraphs and the result of self-evaluation at English Education Study Program, the students' achievement in writing paragraphs was unsatisfactory. Some main problems related to content, organization, word choice, sentence structure, grammar usage, and mechanics were encountered by the students. To overcome these handicaps, the researcher proposed one of the appropriate approaches to teaching writing, that is, the process-based approach. This study was designed to improve the ability of the students in writing descriptive paragraphs through the process-based approach. This approach was selected because it could encourage the students to be more actively involved in the steps of the writing process. The research problem was formulated as follows: "How can the ability of the students of English Education Study Program of FKIP Tadulako University in writing paragraphs be improved through the process-based approach?" The research design was Collaborative Classroom Action research in which the researcher and his collaborator worked together in conducting this study. The researcher acted as the lecturer and writing lecturer became the researcher's collaborator to observe the implementation of this approach. It was conducted in two cycles by following the procedures of the action research: planning, implementing, observing, and reflecting the action. Each cycle comprised three meetings. The first meeting was on prewriting and writing the first draft. The second meeting was on revising and editing. The third meeting was on writing the final draft. The data of this study were gathered through the following instruments - observation checklist, field notes, questionnaires, and students' worksheet of final writing. The subjects of this study were the second semester students of English Education Study Program of FKIP Tadulako University in 2008/2009 Academic Year. This study involved 29 students, 27 of them were active during this study, because two of them were sick. The finding of the study indicated that the process-based approach was successful in improving the ability of the students in writing paragraphs. The improvement could be seen from the increase of the students' writing mean scores from 19.04 (63.46) in the first cycle to 25.37 (84.57) in the second cycle. In addition, it showed that there was an increase of their active participation from 56.82% in the first cycle to 84.09% in the second cycle in the writing process. The findings of this study revealed that the appropriate approach in teaching writing encompasses the following procedures. First, the prewriting step was done to get out and organise ideas by clustering the ideas in the clustering list and outlining the clustered ideas in the outlining list. Second, the step of writing the first draft was excecuted to explore the ideas in the outlining list into writing several sentences to develop the central topic. Then, the sentences were organized to form the three main parts of a paragraph: a topic sentence, supporting sentences, and a concluding sentence by using transitional order signals. The revising step was administered to identify and correct the paragraph content and organization through self-/peer revising. Fourth, the editing step was done to identify and correct the incorrect sentence structure, word choice, grammar usage, and mechanics (spellings, punctuations, and capitalizations) through self-/peer editing. Fifth, the step of writing the final draft was carried out to rewrite the revised and edited first draft into the final draft by handwriting and computer-typing. Based on the findings, it is suggested that lecturers of writing paragraphs can apply the procedures of the steps of the process-based approach if they found problems that are almost similar to the problems in this study. Then, it is suggested that the head of English Education Study Program at this faculty can make a policy in developing education quality by conducting dissemination of the procedures of this approach for the lecturers of Writing II course (writing paragraphs) and having them apply this approach to teaching this course. Moreover, further researchers are suggested to conduct their classroom action research using this approach to improve the ability of students who have the same problems as in this study in other types of paragraphs such as narrative, expository, persuasive, and argumentative.