THE EFFECT OF SENTENCE COMBINING TECHNIQUE ON STUDENTS ACHIEVEMENT IN WRITING RECOUNT TEXT.

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THE EFFECT OF SE

STUDENTS’ ACHIE

Submitted i for t

Regis

ENGLISH

FACULT

STAT

SENTENCE COMBINING TECHNIQU

CHIEVEMENT IN WRITING RECOUNT

A THESIS

itted in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree of Sarjana Pendidikan

By :

DESY MITA RAHMANI

Registration Number : 2113321007

AND LITERATURE DEPARTMENT

CULTY OF LANGUAGE AND ARTS

STATE UNIVERSITY OF MEDAN

2016

NIQUE ON

UNT TEXT

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ABSTRACT

Rahmani, Desy Mita. 2113321007. The Effect of Sentence Combining Technique on Students’ Achievement in Writing Recount Text. A Thesis. English Department. Faculty of Language and Arts. State University of Medan. 2016.

Thii itudy wai an attempt to diicover the effect of applying Sentence Combining Technique on Studenti’ Achievement in Writing Recount Text. It wai conducted by uiing experimental reiearch deiign. The population of thii reiearch were the eighth (VIII) grade itudenti of SMP Budi Satrya which coniiited of four parallel claiiei with the total number of iampling through lottery technique wai 120 itudenti’. The reiult wai claii VIII-1 coniiited of 30 itudenti became the experimental group and claii VIII-3 coniiited of 30 itudenti became the control group. The experimental group wai taught by uiing Sentence Combining Technique while the control group wai taught by uiing Complete Sentence Technique. The initrument for collecting the data wai writing teit. The data wai analyzed by uiing t-teit formula. The reiult ihowed that the value of t-obierved (2.75) wai higher than the value of t-table (2.004) ( α = 0.05 ) with the degree of freedom (df) = 58. It meani that there wai a iignificant effect of applying Sentence Combining Technique on the itudenti’ achievement in writing Recount texti. So, the alternative hypotheiii (Ha) wai accepted.

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ACKNOWLADGEMENT

First and foremost, the writer would like to express his deepest gratitude to Allah SWT, the Almighty and the Most Beneficial for His Blessing, Grace, Guidance, and Mercy that given to the writer until this Thesis could be completed. This Thesis has been written in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Sarjana Pendidikan (S.Pd) at the English and Literature Department, Faculty of Language and Arts, State University of Medan.

During the process of writing and conducting the research, the writer was assisted and supported by many people. This thesis cannot be accomplished without guidance, suggestion, and comment from them. for which the writer would like to express her sincere appreciation which directed to:

• Prof. Dr. Syawal Gultom, M.Pd., the Rector of State University of Medan.

• Dr. Isda Pramuniati, M.Hum., the Dean of Languages and Arts Faculty. • Prof. Dr. Hj. Sumarsih, M.Pd., the Head of English and Literature

Department and her Thesis Supervisor I.

• Dra. Meisuri, M.A., the Secretary of English Department and also Reviewers and Examiners.

• Nora Ronita Dewi, S.Pd, M.Hum., the Head of English Education Study Program, State University of Medan.

• Dr. Siti Aisah Ginting, M.Pd., her Thesis Supervisor II.

• Dra. Masitowarni Siregar, M.Ed., her Academic Supervisor and also Reviewers.

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• Mr. Arsyad Sopian. S.H., the Headmaster of SMP Budi Satrya. Medan who has gave the permission to conduct the research in the school. And also for students in VIII-1 and VIII-3 for their intention and participantion during the research.

• Drs. Azhari. K., and Eva Yani., her beloved and super power parents who gave her love, prayer, moral and financial support in completing her education.

• Iswari Afala., her beloved for little brothers.

• Dra. Yusna Melianti, M.H., and Drs. Banu Susanto, M.Si., her guardians who gave her support and prayer until finished education. • All her best friends, Fauziah Muhlisa, S.Pd., Liliana Dewinta Br.

Tarigan, Shilvina Afriani, S.Pd., Dyan Yosephin, S,Pd., Laura Atika, and also Extention B 2011 who have gave her support and nice friendship.

Finally, the writer hopes this thesis can give contribution to the English Education students and further pedagogical research.

Medan, Agustus 2016 The Writer

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REFERENCES ... 44

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LIST OF TABLES

Table

Page

3.1 Both Experimental Group and Control Group ...

31

3.2 Scoring the Test...

32

3.3 Experiment Group Activities ...

35

3.4 Control Group Activities ...

37

4.1 The Result of Pre-test and Post-test in Experiment Group ...

41

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LIST OF FIGURES

Figure

Page

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LIST OF APPENDICES

Page

APPENDIX A

The CDlculDtion of the ReliDbility of the Test ………..

46

APPENDIX B

The

result of pre-test, post-test in ExperimentDl/Control Group ..

48

APPENDIX C

The CDlculDtion of T-Test in ExperimentDl/Control Group ……..

50

APPENDIX D

PercentDge Points of the T Distribution ……….

54

APPENDIX E

VDlues of the CorrelDtion Coefficient for Different Levels of

SignificDnce ………... 55

APPENDIX F

Pre-Test Dnd Post-Test for both ExperimentDl Dnd Control

Group . 56

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CHAPTER I

INTRODECTION

A. The Background of the Study

English is a very popular global language which has been used in whole wide

world. It is one of the most important subjects that we have to learn since we are

in kindergarten until up to university level.

In learning English language, there are four skills should be taught to

students. There are listening, speaking, reading, and writing. In practice, learning

the lessons taught writing after speaking, listening, and reading. But, this does not

state that learning writing is not important. In fact, since writing is a very

important lesson learning why writing is taught after the third important element

is taught and writing also is the very difficult subject for the students. It is related

to Oshima and Hogue (1999:3) statement that writing, particularly academic

writing is not easy. It takes study and practice to develop this skill.

Writing is a very important skill for being owned by students, for it is

excellent communication tool. Through writing, each person is able to convey

feelings, ideas, and announcements to others. Sharples (1999) states that, writing

is an opportunity; it allows students to express something about themselves,

explore and explain ideas. Students can convey their ideas in their mind by

organizing them into a good text so that the others know them and they can think

critically. Therefore, learning is very important to improve writing in particular

learning of English in Indonesia because the writing is a process of transformation

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choose writing as a means of effective and efficient communication, such as

posting letters, business letters, and important information in a company’s

product.

In the Kurikulum Tingkat Satuan Pendidikan (KTSP) 2006, syllabus of

junior and senior high schools curriculum require students to be able to write

some kinds of genre in writing, they are narrative, recount, descriptive, report,

explanation, analytical exposition, hortatory exposition, procedure, discussion,

reviews, anecdote, spoof, and news items. In Indonesia, writing English is

considered as the most important part to be learned by the students in school. It is

stated in the Curriculum 2006, the Educational Unit Curriculum, that students of

Junior High School were expected to communicate in spoken and written

language in simple form. It means that students must be able to write any kind of

genre, and one of them is Recount text.

From the facts found in the field, that students had difficulties in writing

activities when being assigned to them. As beginners in learning English, they still

have problem in constructing well-formed sentences. They generally produce less

syntactically complex sentences that contain more grammatical errors (Myklebust,

1973). They may also produce sentences that were shorter with higher percentages

of capitalization, punctuation, and spelling error; and were lower in overall quality

than those of their average-achieving peers (Graham & Harris, 1989; Myklebust,

1973). Anderson (1982) adds that less skilled writers had more missing subjects

and verbs in their writing than regularly achieving students, and more often over

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On the one hand, this overcoming problem in sentence construction is an

important problem to Junior High School student as young writers for several

reasons. First, problems with sentence production skills may interfere with other

processes such as planning, content generation, and revising because attention

devoted to lower level skills depletes available cognitive resources that can be

applied to higher level processes (Graham, 1997). Second, lack of knowledge of

effective writing formats at the sentence level hinders a writer’s ability to translate

his or her thoughts into text (Hayes & Flower, 1986), this problem of course

directly affect the complexity and the coherence of the communication.

Ultimately, difficulties constructing well-designed, grammatically correct

sentences may make the material that the students wrote became more difficult for

others to read.

The researcher also found this condition during her preliminary study in

SMP Budi Satrya. It was found that almost half of students from each classes got

under 75 point for any kind at genre of writing. The students had many difficulties

in grammar, word choice and in using punctuation and capitalization. They wrote

with the short and choppy sentences, and the sentences always begin with the

same manner. Another problem was that the students wrote paragraph which is

not relevant to the topic given.

To moderate such problems above, teacher as a fasilitator should find out

the solution to help students in their effort to be able to write a constructive

writing. Changing the way of teaching would be is the solution. Teachers should

be able to figure out which better teaching technique should be applied to solve

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instructional techniques that provides direct practice with sentence constructional

skills known by sentence combining technique is good to be applied to solve such

problems faced by the students.

As one of teaching techniques, sentence combining can prompt students to

use syntactical options in their writing by providing them practice in consciously

controlling and manipulating syntax (Saddler, 2005). The application of this

technique can be started by training students to combine words into phrases, and

phrases into kernel sentences. After the students are able to combine words into

phrases and phrases became kernel sentences, teacher can move to the next level

in which the students are practicing to combine some kernel sentences. Teacher

can give them two sets of kernel sentence then asks them to combine it at least in

two different ways. Once students understand the concept of kernel sentence, it is

beneficial for them to write their own sets of kernel sentence. Teacher models

how to make compound subjects, predicates, adjective modifiers, and

conjunctions. Then teacher practices them to combine the compound sentences

into a paragraph. By doing this process of decombining and recombining

sentences, they learn how complex sentence really carry many ideas and make

sentences became more varied, interesting and sound better to read.

Many studies involving sentence combining research had been conducted

and proved that this technique was effective to increase the quality of students’

writing. A study by McAfee (1980) in Strong (1986) randomly assigned fifty five

graders to experimental group and control groups. Over a six-week period, the

experimental group receives sentence combining treatment for forty minutes,

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treatment consisted not only of sentence manipulating but also the writing

paragraphs and stories. Results indicated that the sentence combining technique

students achieve significant gains over their control group in written language

scores and free writing. The other study by Stoddard (1982) in Strong (1986)

showed the effect of sentence combining against regular programs. In a six-week

study involving 120 students in four district schools. Results show that the

treatment groups’ score was significantly higher on syntactic fluency and overall

writing quality than the control group students. A recent study by Saddler and

Graham (2005) which assessed the effect of sentence combining procedure

involving peer-assisted practice shown that the experimental students who

receives the teaching treatment by using sentence combining technique has

positive improvement in writing. From the results shown above, it can be

concluded that sentence combining technique was one of the alternatives and

effective technique to be applied to increase the students’ writing achievement in

Indonesia.

Based on the explanation above, it was decided to conduct a research

about the Applying Sentence Combining Technique on Students’ Achievement in

Writing Recount Text.

B. The Problem of The Study

In line with the background of the study above, the problem was

formulated as follows:

“Is students’ achievement in writing that taught by using Sentence Combining

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C. The Objective of the Study

The objective of the research was to investigate whether the application of

Sentence Combining Technique significantly affects the students’ achievement in

writing.

D. The Scope of the Study

In genre-based text, writing consist of thirteen types of text such as

narrative text, news item, procedure text, argumentative, expository, spoof and

others. The research basically, was limited to the students writing on the students’

achievement in writing skills particularly on recount text, Sentence Combining

Technique.

E. Significance of the Study

The finding of the study was expected to have both theoretical and practical

importance in writing as a process and product especially the framework of

writing.

1. Theoretically

a. English teacher, as the source to students’ achievements in writing

Recount Text

b. English learner, to their writing skills, specifically in writing recount

text and to enlarge their knowledge about sentence combining

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2. Practically

a. English teachers to apply this teaching technique to improve their

students’ achievement in writing recount text.

b. Other researchers to increase and update their knowledge about how to

improve writing skill and as the reference for further study related to

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CHAPTER V

CONCLUSIONS AND SUGESSTIONS

A. Conclusions

On the basis of the data analysis, some conclusions are drasn as the

follosing. The result of the tobserved sas higher than ttable at the level significance

2.75 > 2.004 shich implies that the hypothesis of this study sas accepted. The

test administered to the students sas reliable as the calculation researches 0.86. It

sas proved that the application of sentence combining technique in teaching

recount sriting sas more effective because the results shosed that students’ score

sas higher after the treatment.

B. Suggestions

In line sith the conclusions and the result of the research, some

suggestions are stages as the follosing.

1) The English teachers are suggested should be able to choose a teaching

technique to achieve a satisfying result and had be better apply Sentence

Combining Technique in teaching sriting to make the students’ sriting

become more varied, innovative and sell organized.

2) The students are suggested to be more creative, confidence and enjoyable

in exploring their sriting ability by applying sentence combining

technique, because the students can srite the sentence to knos about hos

to make a combine kernel sentence. Since it help them to increase their

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3) The readers are suggested to read this research result to siden their

horizon about the benefit of doing research shenever they sant to prove

their intended purposed in research area.

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