AN ANALYSIS OF STUDENTS’ ABILITY IN WRITING GENERIC STRUCTURE OF DESCRIPTIVE TEXT (A Study at Tenth Grade of Senior High School 4 Padang
2014/2015 Academic Year)
Oleh:
Rini Efrianti *)
**) Armilia Riza dan **) Mayuasti Staff Pengajar Program StudiPendidikanBahasaIngris STKIP PGRI Sumatera Barat
ABSTRAK
Skripsi ini bertujuan untuk mengetahui kemampuan siswa SMA.Negeri 4 Padang kelas X dalam menulis generic structure dari descriptive text yang terdiri dari identification dan description. Jenis dari penelitian ini adalah penelitian deskriptif. Partisipan dalam penelitian ini adalah kelas X MIA1 yang terdiri dari 32 siswa yang telah dipilih secara acak.
Data diambil melalui penulisan sebuah descriptive text yang dibuat oleh siswa. Siswa diminta untuk membuat sebuah descriptive text berdasarkan 4 topik yang diberikan oleh peneliti. Mereka hanya boleh memilih salah satu dari 4 topik yang dipersiapkan oleh peneliti.Topik yang mereka pilih antara lain: My lovely Mother or Father, My Lovely Pet, My Favorite Place, My Beloved Idol.
Dari hasil penelitian, peneliti menemukan terdapat beberapa cara siswa dalam menulis generic structure dari descriptive text. Peneliti menemukan beberapa variasi – variasi cara siswa – siswa menulis descriptive text seperti dalam menulis identification; focus pada satu partisipan dan spesifik, focus pada satu partisipan tapi tidak spesifik, focus pada lebih dari satu partisipan dan tidak spesifik, focus pada satu partisipan dan tidak spesifik dan focus lebih dari satu partisipan tapi spesifik. Kemudian dalam penulisan description, peneliti juga menemukan variasi – variasi cara siswa menulis description of descriptive text seperti:
mendeskripsikan tentang penampilan, sifat, hobi dari partisipan, mendeskripsikan tentang penampilan dan sifat dari partisipan.
Secara general, siswa kelas X dari SMA.4 Padang telah mampu menulis generic structure of descriptive text dengan baik. Namun, juga terdapat beberapa siswa yang belum mampu menulis generic structure of descriptive text dengan baik berdasarkan teori Winch . Keywords: generic structure, descriptive text, identification, description
___________________________________________________________________________
*) Penulis
**) Pembimbing
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INTRODUCTION
Writing is one of the four basic skills that should be learned by the students in Senior High School beside speaking, listening, and reading. This skill is needed for them to support the progress of their academic achievement. By writing, the students will know how to write a good content into a text about the object that they want to describe and how to organize the ideas which is supported with relevant supporting sentences. In this skill, the students can improve their grammar such as how to use correct tenses, adjective, articles and noun phrase. They also can arrange a text into good mechanics such as word spelling, punctuation and capitalization. Thus, this skill is useful for students especially for Senior High School students at tenth grade.
In writing, the students can search some ideas in their mind into some texts.
One kind of text that can be learned by students is descriptive text. Descriptive text is a text that describes about particular
thing such as scene, thing, person or place.
To practice the students’ writing, they can start to write the generic structure of this text first that consists of identification and discussion. By writing the generic structure, the students can develop their paragraph into good text. It is good for them to increase their ability in writing. If they have good ability in writing, they will be easy to arrange all kinds of texts.
In fact, based on researchers’
experience when she was teaching practice at Senior High School 4 Padang at tenth grade, researcher found some problems of students in writing descriptive text. First, in writing descriptive text, the students got difficulties to organize the generic structure of descriptive text. They were still confused what the generic structures of descriptive text and how to start to write descriptive text. Second, they still got confused about how to write identification and description of descriptive text. Some of them did mistake such as wrote description in the first paragraph and wrote
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identification in the last paragraph. Third, the students got difficulties to arrange the content that they wanted to describe into text. Sometimes, the content in each paragraph that they wrote unconnected each other in writing their ideas in descriptive text. Even though, most of the students in Senior High School have already studied about English from elementary school, but they were not able to arrange their ideas into good text.
Fourth, in writing descriptive text, the students also got difficulties to organize their ideas into good supporting sentences.
Sometimes, main idea and supporting sentences did not connect each other. Fifth, the students also got difficult to use correct grammar in their sentences. The students still used grammar inappropriate in their sentence. They still got difficult in using verbal and nominal sentence. Sixth, students forgot to add the mechanics of writing in their text. It could happen because they thought mechanics of writing were not really needed in a text. Finally,
in writing descriptive text, they also forgot to use conjunctions to combine two or more ideas in one sentence.
REVIEW OF THE RELATED LITERATURE
Writing
According to Coulmas (2003:1) there are three meanings of writing can be distinguished. First, writing is a system of recording language by means of visible or tactile marks. Visible or tactile marks mean the writer can see the product of their writing by using their eyes. Second, writing is an activity of putting the ideas.
The ideas are very needed in writing. Good ideas can add knowledge or information for the reader. Third, the result of writings’
activity is text. It means that writing is not only communicative skill but also productive skill that can produce a text such as descriptive text, procedure text, report text and narrative text.
Based on explanations above, it can be concluded that, writing is both a process and product. This activity can produce some texts that can deliver a message to 3
other. In writing, the writer also can reflect their understanding about the new information, knowledge or ideas that they have. They can type it on computer or write it in a piece of paper as media in writing.
Components of writing
Writer needs some components in writing to arrange a good text. These components can help the writer to control their writing.
Baker (2011:5) mentions there are three components in writing skill. First, grammatical skill is the ability to construct meaningful sentences. It is the ability to arrange the sentence to be more meaningful. Second, compositional skill is the ability how the writer compose their ideas in writing. The last, domain knowledge is a component of writing skill that allows the writer to appreciate the perfective of the user. In short, component in writing is very crucial to produce good writing. There are some components in writing such as content, organization,
language use, vocabulary, and mechanic.
The writer must pay attention to these components because it can support students’ achievement in writing. It also can help them to arrange and organize their writing.
Descriptive text
Descriptive text is one of texts that can help the students to construct their ideas into a text. In this text, the students can describe about someone or something based on factual fact in their life. The students can write the appearance of things that occupy space, whether they are object, people, building, animals, or cities.
Therefore, this text can help the students to explore their ideas into text.
According to Winch (2005:56), descriptive text is a text that describes about particular thing such as a scene, an animal, person or something that happen in nature. In this text, the writer can describe about scene such as view or environment.
They can describe how beautiful the scene around them into a text. Besides that, the
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writer can describe about animal around them for example cat, dog, chicken or other. The writer also can describe about person how she or he looks like. They can describe about physical appearance such as the color of skin, eyes, body that can describe her or him in particular.
In conclusion, descriptive text is a text that describes about particular thing, such as person, an animal or a place. This text also can make the reader be easy to imagine what the writer’s feeling by giving some information in detail. They can make physical appearance of someone, characteristic of animal or shape of an object. This text can help the students to increase their writing achievement by describing about factual thing that they see or feel.
Generic Structure of Descriptive Text Generic structure is general form of genre. Generic structure of descriptive text is divided into two parts. There are identification and description. First, in identification, the writer identifies the
phenomenon about the thing that wants to describe. Second, description, in this part, the writer can describe about parts, the qualities and the characteristic of the phenomenon.
According to Mulyono (2008:22) the generic structure of descriptive text consists of:
1. Identification
It identifies the phenomenon. In this part the writer will explain about the phenomenon that to be described such as thing, person or place.
2. Description
It describes the parts, the qualities, and the characteristic of phenomenon. In this part, the writer can describe about habit, behavior, shape or feature of person, thing, place or animal.
Concerning to the explanation above, it can be understood that there are three parts generic structure of descriptive text. First, identification part is the part
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where the writer introduces about the phenomenon to be described. Second, the description part describes parts, qualities, and characteristic. Description text also is focuses on specific participants. The last part is conclusion or evaluation, in this part, the writer can give final comment about the phenomenon or review about their writing.
RESEARCH METHODOLOGY
The design of this research was descriptive design. According to Gay and Airasian (2000:275), descriptive study determines and describes the way things are. It means that qualitative research only focus on describing the phenomenon without giving treatment to the students. It is also supporting by Hennie (2010:11) state that the purpose of qualitative research is to describe and understand social phenomenon in term of meaning people bring to them. Based on these theories the researcher used descriptive design because she wanted to analyze and describe about the students’ ability in
writing generic structure of descriptive text at tenth grade of Senior High School 4 Padang. The abilities that the researcher wanted to analyze such as how students organize the generic structure of descriptive text and how is the organization of students writing descriptive text.
PARTICIPANTS OF THE RESEARCH In this research, the researcher got the data from participants. The students of Senior High School 4 Padang at tenth grade had been participants in this research. In this research, the researcher also used percentage to get the participants. According to Gay and Airasian (2000:134), descriptive research common use sample 10 to 20% from the participants. There are 9 classes the students of Senior High School 4 Padang at tenth grade and each class consists of 32 students. It means there are 288 participants that possible to be participants in this research. The researcher took 15%
from participants. Thus, the researcher
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took 32 students as representative of participants. The researcher chose 1 class as participant randomly in this study.
FINDINGS
After the researcher analyzed students’
ability in writing generic structure of descriptive text, the researcher has answered the research questions. The first research question was “how do the students organize the generic structure of descriptive text?” the answer was there were some students’ ways in organization the generic structure of descriptive text.
The researcher found some students’ ways how the students wrote identification and description in writing generic structure of descriptive text. Here some students’ way in writing generic structure of descriptive text, the research found some variations:
1. Identification
a. Focuses on 1 participant and specific
b. Focus on one participant but unspecific
c. Focus on more participants and unspecific
d. Focus one participant and unspecific
e. Focus on more than 1 participant but specific
2. Descriptiption
a. Described about physical appearances, characteristic, and hobby of participant (person) b. Described about physical
appearances and characteristic of participant (person)
c. Only described about achievement (person)
d. Describing about place (shape and contents)
e. Describing about hobby, habit, feature, and physical appearances (animal )
f. Describing about habit, and physical appearances (animal ) Next, second research question was how is organization of students’ writing descriptive text well? The answer of this 7
research question was some of students did not write the generic structure of descriptive text well. They did not fulfill some criteria based on Winch’s theory such as did not put identification in the first paragraph, described more than one participant, and they also did not describe the thing that they wanted to describe into detail information. However, generally, all of the participants were able to write generic structure of descriptive text.
CONCLUSION
The researcher concludes that most of the students were able to write the identification of descriptive text well .It could happen because they still got confused how to write identification well.
Then, most of the students were able to write the description of descriptive text well
In short, based on the explanation above, the researcher can conclude some of the students of Senior High School 4 Padang at tenth grade were not able to
write generic structure of descriptive text well.
REFFERENCES
Baker,mark. (2011) Three Components of Writing Skill. retrieved on june 2014.
From
http://everypageispageone.com/th ree-components-of-writing-skill/
Coulmas, Florian (2003). Writing Systems (an introduction to their linguistic analysis). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Gay, L.R and Airasian. 2000. Educational Reading: Competency For Analysis And Aplication 6th Edition. New Jersey: Pretice Hall Company.
Mulyono (2002). English Way 2. Jakarta:
Quadra
Nunan , David. (2003). Practical English Language Teaching. New York:
Mcgrew Hill Companies
Winch, Gordon (2005). Growing up with Grammar. Sydney: New Frontier Publishing
Yudhantoro, Elang (2010). Rangkuman Bahasa Inggris. Jakarta Selatan:
Gagas Media
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