Improving Students Writing Ability By Using Diary

Next, my deepest appreciation and love is presented to my loving parents, Asnawi, S.Pd and Lisahiyah, S.Pd. Sarach Meilia Aliyah, who always lends me money and listens to my complaints, supported and motivated me with love, and I thank my brother Muhammad Khalil Maula Aliyah. However, there are still many people who do not know the true importance of writing skills.

The study aimed to find out that writing in a diary can improve the writing skills of the students. Therefore, it can be concluded that the diary method can improve students' writing ability.

Background of Study

There are several aspects of writing ability that students must consider, namely: content, organization, vocabulary, grammar, and mechanics. In order to support students' writing ability, good media to improve students' writing skills, such as a journal, are needed. According to several previous studies, students' writing ability was poor because there was no interest of students in learning to write.

Consequently, author was interested in investigating the use of diaries to improve students' writing ability. Based on the research background mentioned, the author's focus in this research is to find out that the diary writing can improve the students' writing ability.

Research Question

This was also made clear by Vita (2013), who stated that there were several weaknesses in this study where students used the same words over and over again. In addition, the lack of writing experience among students means that students do not know what to think about in writing.

The Aim of The Study

Another goal is to investigate whether these media can be applied to the learning process at school.

Research Benefit

Hypothesis

Research Terminologies

Definitions of Diary

But from the world of education, diaries can improve students' skills, such as being used as a medium or method to help students improve their English writing skills. On the other hand, the broad definition of diary is also expressed by Kellen (2010) who said that "a diary is a person's record about himself or his environment written frequently, spontaneously, and therefore original and clear personal expressions produces, which is one of the qualities that literature values. A diary is not only a record of events about what happens to a person, but important documentation of events that take place around him, both on a national and international scale, from fighting matches to match wars on the football pitch”.

Langan (2011) put it the same way: "a journal or diary is a daily record written about something that happened to you".

Writing Ability

Elements of Writing

The topic sentence is the embodiment of the statement of the main idea of the paragraph in general or abstract form (Tarigan, 2008). Supporting sentences are sentences that develop the topic sentence by providing reasons, examples, facts, statistics, quotations, comparisons, definitions, and classifications. A concluding sentence is a sentence that marks the end of a paragraph and leaves the reader with an important point to remember.

The main idea is stated in the topic sentence, and then each supporting sentence develops. Coherence means that the paragraph is easy to read and understand because the supporting sentences are in some sort of logical sequence and the ideas are connected.

The Benefits of Writing

Diary

The Definitions of Diary

It also records personal thoughts and feelings and is intended to be read by others or kept for yourself. It is said that this diary method allows students to express their ideas more easily as they write down only the events that happened to them and without any pressure from any party. From some of the above statements it can be said that a diary is a small entry made by several people to express all the feelings, complaints, ideas or important events that the author has experienced and whose purpose is to be remembered for themselves or others.

A journal is included in the textual content type of storytelling, specifically non-public textual storytelling, so the format used in the journal is similar to the format of textual storytelling content. Pour out what we want to write freely, which means that when pouring out personal experience, it should be free, without the mental space that restricts it when writing in a journal, but good and correct language should be used.

The Benefits of Diary

Do not delay, it means that even if we want to write our story in a diary, we cannot delay the writing. Include the time and date when making notes, this means that whenever we write our experiences in a diary, we must include the time and date, it is recommended that we know when the story happened.

The Previous of Study

The results of this study showed that there were improvements in the students' writing ability in the five aspects, namely the content, organization, vocabulary, language use and mechanics. Further research by Ayse (2019) This study aimed to identify the effect of using reflective diaries in grade 4 Turkish classes on bilingual students' academic performance and writing ability. According to Vita (2013), the research aimed to prove whether diary writing is effective in improving students' skill in writing retelling text or not.

The results of this research were based on the result of both tests, the author found that the t-score was 8.56. Finally, the use of diary writing was effective in improving the students' skill in writing retelling text.

Research Design

It involves the type of research design, participants in the research, instruments of the research, data analysis techniques and procedures of the research.

Research Participants

Method of Data Collection

Data Analysis

The above table showed the students' score scale based on the pre-test and post-test scores. If the value of the standard deviation is much greater than the mean value, the mean value is a poor representation of the entire data. Meanwhile, if the standard deviation value is very small compared to the mean value, then the mean value is a good representation that can be used as a representation of all data by Sugiyono (2013).

Because the total number of students is 29, the writer uses the t-table = 2.75 as a standard to know whether there is a significant improvement or not between the pre-test and the post-test. The purpose of descriptive analysis is useful to find out the description of data such as frequency, minimum score, maximum, mean and standard deviation.

Results

In this last meeting, at the beginning of the class after preparing the class, the author conducted a post-test. Because of this, the author gives a score of 3 or enough organized in accordance with the writing assessment of Brown (1993). On the vocabulary aspect, the author gives a score of 4, namely use words effectively, choice/word use or word form mastery, in accordance with the writing assessment of Brown (1993).

The writer gives 2 points for organization, which means acceptable organization according to the Brown writing score. And the writer gives a score of 3, there are frequent punctuation, capitalization and spelling errors, it hinders readability. In the mechanical part of the writing above, many capital letters are used in the middle of a sentence.

In the content section, the results of the writing are still consistent with the context that explains the experiences at school, but lack detailed support that explains the main sentence. This shows progress compared to the pre-test results where students do not understand the use of the simple present tense. In agreement with Brown's assessment, the writer gives a score of 3 with only a few errors in tense and word order.

In the writing above, the results of the student's writing are mostly relevant to the topic. This is in line with the purpose of the diary to tell about the author's experiences. From the calculations, writing review texts led to different results for students' mean scores on the pretest and posttest.

In this section, the author will analyze the results of the pre- and post-test mean values and the standard deviation. And compared to the results of the post-test with 59.13 scores and the number of students who passed the KKM was 11 people.

Table 2.1 The Student’s Pre-Test Score No Student’s

Discussion

In the pre-test results, it was found that only a few students scored above the KKM. Looking at the standard deviation results with the 30 results, the standard deviation value is less than the mean value. The results of the pretest clearly show that no student achieves the highest score based on the classification table data for the written pretest.

Students who obtained low scores were 28 students (96.34%) and the average pre-test of students was 85. Considering the results of the writing pre-test, the difficulties students had in writing diaries were that they did not know about organizing ideas and the tenses used in writing. This shows an increase whereby none of the students achieved the minimum standard criteria scores during the pretest.

In other aspects there is also a high increase, but not very significant comparison results. The pre-test scores of the students were far from the KKM scores in which not a single student exceeded the KKM scores. The average pre-test scores are in the low frequency level section, which means that students' writing ability is still very low.

Judging from the results of the post-test, some students got scores that were far from the results of the pre-test. According to her pretest, he was inadequate for organization, also for vocabulary was not good enough, but the meaning was blurred. By comparing the result average of pre-test and post-test, and also used a sample t-test to known concluded that the use of diary writing was effective because there was an improvement in the students' scores.

Suggestions

The problem formulation of this study is that there is an improvement in students' writing ability after using diaries. It can be interpreted that the diary improves students' writing ability, so that they can understand how to write properly and correctly. Euis, F (2015), The use of diary writing to improve eight grade students' writing skills.Eurido, Malang.

KOMPETENSI INTI

KOMPETENSI DASAR DAN INDIKATOR PENCAPAIAN KOMPETENSI/IPK

TUJUAN PEMBELAJARAN

MATERI PEMBELAJARAN 1. Fungsi Sosial Teks

PENDEKATAN/MODEL/METODE PEMBELAJARAN Pendekatan : scientific approach