Developing Magazine for Writing Class
Daftar Isi:
- In this study, the researcher wanted to describe the students’ responses the project of magazine. To reveal the students’ responses, the researcher had to implement the project of developing magazine in this class. Developing magazine is a project assignment where student who work in a group create one magazine. Magazine itself is a collection of variety of writing genre. When students are assigned to do this project, they are expected to write different types of writing. There are several types of writing such as: narratives, descriptive, expository, and argumentative, tips and hints, report, narrative, scientific and factual issues, recipes, poems, advertisement, interview famous people, anecdotes, short story, film or song review, advertisement, puzzle and many more. This study involved one group of Writing IV consisting 25 students majoring in English academic year 2005/2006 at University of Muhammadiyah Malang. Writing IV took 16 meetings or 8 weeks to complete both the introduction of magazine and the project magazine. In each meeting, a group of students should have already produced at least two types of writing and the other members would proofread of the materials, discuss the format, improve the language use, and plan the layout setting. As the instructor or the participant observer, the researcher spent time with students in small group discussion or entire-class discussion. As a cross data validation, the researcher constructed the open-ended questionnaires. Open-ended questions were used in order to give the respondents freedom to express their own feeling and opinions. Therefore, it may reflect what the respondents want to say since the researcher will not restrict them with the provided options. From analyzing the questionnaire, it was discovered that the students’ responses to the project magazine fell into 4 categories. The magazine writing eased understanding of writing material. This project benefited and improved students’ writing skills; it developed the students’ knowledge about anything they were going to write in their project magazine; and last but not least, this project magazine gave them fun learning experience. None of the student’s response was negative.