1
TEACHING WRITING DESCRIPTIVE TEXT BY COMBINING MIND MAPPING
STRATEGY AND PEN PAL LETTERS STRATEGY OF THE SECOND GRADE IN JUNIOR HIGH SCHOOL
by
Rizky Atika*)
**) M. Khairi Ikhsan, M.Pd staf pengajar Program Studi Pendidikan Bahasa Inggris STKIP PGRI Sumatera Barat
ABSTRAK
Menulis adalah salah satu keahlian yang harus dikuasai oleh peserta didik dalam proses belajar mengajar, namun banyak dari siswa yang mengalami kesulitan dalam menulis sebuah teks. Salah satu strategi belajar yang dapat membantu siswa dalam menangani hal tersebut adalah pengkombinasian dari dua strategi yaitu Mind Mapping dan Pen Pal letters. Makalah ini bertujuan untuk menambah strategi pembelajaran Bahasa Inggris terutama dalam Writing Skill. Dalam strategi ini siswa diminta untuk dapat menulis sebuah teks yang diajarkan. Tahap pertama yaitu menggunakan Mind Mapping Strategy. Strategi ini membantu siswa dalam mengembangakan ide nya. Tahap yang kedua yaitu menggunakan Pen Pal Letters Strategy. Strategi ini digunakan agar siswa lebih tertarik dalam menulis. Dengan penggabungan dua strategi ini diharapkan dapat saling mendukung antara satu strategi dengan yang lainnya. Penulis berharapkan dalam penggabungan dua strategi ini, siswa dapat menghasilkan sebuah teks deskripsi yang baik
Key words: writing, descriptive text, mind mapping,and pen pal letters
A. Introduction
` Writing is one of four skills that should be mastered by students. Writing is important for English students to develop because writing is needed by many aspect of student’s life. First, it needed to share ideas.
Writing will help students to deliver their point of view about something in written form. Second it also needed to give information. For example student must be able to make a short written form like memo, announcement, and the others. Third, through writing skill students can write a formal letter and informal letter. And the last point, this skill is needed to do writing assesment such as exercise, final project, paper, thesis, etc.
These are the reason why writing skill is important for students and student must be able to write even though not all of students can make a good writing product.
Nowadays educational system in Indonesia use KTSP (Kurikulum Tingkat
Satuan Pendidikan). Based on KTSP, the purpose of learning english at Junior High School is to make students able to use english as a language to communicate. It is mean that students must be able to produce English not only in spoken but also in written form. The standard of Junior High School for student’s ability in English is the students are expected to be able to access the language in the classroom.
Teaching writing at school is based on genre-based approach which defines teaching English through different kind of texts. Each text is different on purpose, language features, and its generic structure.
The genre based approach consists of twelve types of text. One of them is descriptive text.
Descriptive text is a kind of text that description someone or something. This text is important to build someone’s ability to identify something.
2 However, writing is the most difficult skill among four skills because in writing a text students need to pay attention all about grammatical, punctuation, coherent, cohesion, etc. Based on writer’s interview to some students in Junior High Scholl, there are some problems that writer can find here. First, teacher does not use any media in teaching writing. It is mean that the class is too monotonous. Second, teacher always asks students to complete their exercise book without make sure how deeps students can understand the topic, so that students are hard to understand about how to writing descriptive. Because of these problem, students do not interesting with writing.
Besides that, in writing text, students have to developing main idea into some supporting detail. So, they have to relations among ideas into a good text. It is hard for students which do not understand about what the teacher teach.
Therefore, it needs some strategies to solve these problems. These strategies not only interesting for students, but also can improve their ability in writing. The first strategy is called Mind Mapping Strategy.
Mind mapping can help students to generating ideas. The second strategy is pen pal letter strategy. This strategy can motivation and make students excited about writing. These strategies are good in combine because Mind Mapping Strategy is good to use in the first and middle time in teaching, and the next strategy called Pen Pal Letter Strategy is good to apply in the middle and last time of teaching process.
B. Discussion 1. Descriptive Text
According to Scholes, et al in Fertesa (2012:15), people most describe what they see, translating perception of an object. It means that descriptive text is telling the reader what someone like looks like.
In addition Samra in Hermansyah (2013: 12) states that descriptive text is a kind of the text that gives illustrations or describes person, place, and thing with in details that the readers can visualize or imagine about the object being described. It means that writer is not only can describes person but also anything else.
In descriptive text students will learn about the generic structure of descriptive text.
As Gerot & Wignel in Syahputra (2013: 3) state that Generic structure of descriptive text consists of two parts. The first part is called identification. Identification part identifies the phenomenon (person, place, or thing) to be described. The second part is describe, qualities, and characteristics of phenomenon being described.
Finally, descriptive text is a text that describe you someone or something which have generic structure; identification and describe.
2. Mind Mapping Strategy
Mind mapping is a strategy in English study. Mind mapping was found by Tony Buzan. He was born on 2 June 1942. He is an English author and educational consultant. He is the inventor of the mind mapping strategy. There are related to those points the writer states some definition of mind mapping proposed by some experts.
According to Rog, (2010: 49), mind mapping is another type of graphic organizer that uses visuals to represent relations among ideas. He (2010: 49) also states that the mini lesson uses a radial style mind map, which is best for descriptive writing. It means that students can develop their ideas through make a relation each of them.
A mind map consists of words and pictures that are linked and arranged around a central key concept. Mind maps are generally used to generate, visualize, structure, and classify thoughts, and can serve as an aid in study, organization, problem solving, and writing (Buzan in Herrera et.al, 2013, 38).
From the state before student have to make a central idea and classify them to easy student create the text.
Next, Glasgow (2010) also state mind mapping also help students to recognize patterns among and between concepts, adopt a stance of multiple perspective taking, and better develop a capacity for reflection and revision of ideas based on critical feedback.
The statement before is means that to make student easy to understanding the concept of what they will write, they need mind mapping strategy.
3. Pen Pal Letters Strategy
A way to provide a genuine writing experience for students is through pen pals (Gebhard, 2006, 220) the statement means
3 that some students will enjoy when write pen pal because it is the real writing experience.
They know someone will read their writing.
Berril and Gall in Linses ( 2005:
102) also state that one type of writing that is common in EFL classrooms is pen-pal or pen- friend letters. Pen-pal letters allow children to develop writing skills within the context of an authentic and purposeful writing activity.
Children can share their ideas through pen pal.
There are several purposes for this writing activity. The first is to have students learn the form of communication, the friendly letter. The second is to have students write to each other students write to other students about themselves, synthesizing their own learning and increasing their comprehension.
(Kuta, 2008,195). The state above telling us that is students will have a good attitude because they have to make a friendly letter and introducing themselves to each other.
Pen pals have provided an authentic audience for children’s writing through the years (Peterson, 2008, 58). It is mean that for many years teacher believe that pen pal is a great way to teaching writing.
4. Teaching Writing descriptive text by combining mind mapping and pen pal letter
a) Preparation
In teaching writing descriptive text, it is necessary to do some preparations before activities are done. A preparation is one thing that should be done by teacher before teaching in the classroom. The good preparation will determine the success of teaching and learning process. An English teacher should have some preparations before starting to teach in the classroom.
The main thing that should be prepared in teaching writing a descriptive text by combining mind mapping strategy and pen pal letters strategy is prepare the example of both of them.
In teaching writing descriptive text, the teacher should prepare the media, topic, and time allocation. First, in choosing the topic, it related to describe the students itself because in their letters the students will introduce themselves.
Next, in application these strategies,
teacher will need about two times meeting.
In additional, the media that can be used by teacher are:
1. Small box. It is used for the place of the letters that have written by the students. They can put their letters on the box. It can be pretend as the post office whose will send their letters to their pen pals.
2. Paper. It is used for the students to write the letter.
3. Envelopes, used to covering the letter.
4. An example of personal letter.
5. In focus, to help the teacher to present the picture or example of letter. It can make teaching learning process more interesting.
b. Procedure of Teaching The steps are:
1) Teacher gives a theme to what they will write.
2) The teacher asks students start with blank paper.
3) Students will write the main idea in the central of the paper.
4) From the central idea teacher will ask students to make sub ideas.
5) Students will start to make the text with developing the sub ideas to be a paragraph. And all paragraphs being a good letter.
6) Next, teacher will take student’s letter
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7) The letter that is taken by the teacher will distribute to another class.
8) The students will read the another letters and replay it
9) Teacher will check their letters and teacher will give appreciation for their letters.
C. Conclusion
Based on the previous discussion, it can be concluded that to improve student’s ability in writing descriptive text, the teacher should pay more attention to the activities and media that can be used in the learning process. The teacher is expected to be a good facilitator in facilitating the learning process in other to make it become more interesting in learning a descriptive text. Applying mind mapping
4 strategy and pen pal letters strategy is the one of the effective strategies to be done.
By using mind mapping strategy, students learn how to develop their ideas.
It also makes students easy to develop the ideas into a good text. Besides that it is very interesting to be done by the students because they will make their ideas like a spider home. It’s really interesting.
However, the second strategy that as important as mind mapping strategy is pen pal letters strategy. By using pen pal letters, students can describe themselves (physically, hobby, interest, dream, school, etc) to their friends in letter form. After that, the students can also wait the replay from their pen pal friends. Why is it interest with them? Because they will feel happy when someone read what their have written.
D. Suggestion
There are two suggestions; for teacher and for readers that writer wants to share in this chapter. First, for the teacher, this strategy in this paper is an alternative way to the teacher when he/ she find some problems in teaching writing descriptive text, problem with developing ideas, and problem about student’s motivation in writing. The last suggestion is for the readers, this strategy is used to add their knowledge about strategy in teaching writing descriptive text.
References
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Herrera, Socordo G, et al. 2013. Accelerating Literary for Diverse Learners. New York. Teacher College Press
Kuta, Katherine Wiesolek. 2008. Reading and Writing to Learn. New York.
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Neni, Fertesa. 2012. The Effect of Adopting English Prime as an Instructional Tool Toward Student’s Ability in Writing Descriptive Text at SMAN 2 Padang. Padang. English Department Faculty of Languages and Arts State University of Padang
Peterson, Shelley S. 2005. Writing Across the Curriculum. Canada. Portage and Main Press
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