UTILIZING THE DIGITAL STORY TO IMPROVE THE WRITING SKILL OF THE EIGHTH GRADERS OF SMPN 5 MALANG

ABSTRAK Masita, Eni. 2014. Utilizing the Digital Story to Improve the Writing Skill of the 8th Graders of SMPN 5 Malang. Thesis, English Department, Faculty of Letters, State University of Malang. Advisor: Dr. Johannes A Prayogo, M.Pd, M.Ed. Key words: The Digital Story, students’ writing skill, recounts text. Writing is often considered as the most difficult and complicated skill among the four language skills. Writing involves complex thinking that must integrate multiple aspects including content, organization, vocabulary, capitalization, punctuation, spelling and word-choice. The 8 graders of SMPN 5 Malang faced some writing problems. The problems were how to generate, organize and develop their ideas. Besides they were also confused to write sentences grammatically and words with correct spellings. As a result, their writing products were still unsatisfactory and could not meet the SKM (Standard KelulusanMinimal). In order to solve the writing problems, the Digital Story was chosen to solve the problems at writing skill. Itis an interesting media for telling a story which combines the art of telling story with a variety of digital multimedia, such as images and audio. It combines some mixture of digital graphics, text and music to present information on a specific topic. It was taught to help students to generate, organize and develop their ideas. Classroom Action Research was used in this study. The research was done in one cycle that covered planning, implementing, observing the action and reflecting on the observation. The researcher worked collaboratively with the English teacher designed the lesson plan and set the criteria of success with the assistance of the English teacher. During the teaching of writing skill, the researcher acted as the teacher who taught the students while the English teacher acted as the observer. The subjects of this study were 28 students of VIII-5 in SMPN 5 Malang in 2013/1014 academic yearwho were always present in the writing activities. The data consisted of the students’ writing grades and then responses toward the teaching and learning process. The data were collected through questionnaires, observation checklists, field note and students’ final writings. In the action, the researcher applied the Digital Story in the writing process which consisted of five stages. These stages were prewriting, drafting, revising, editing and publishing. The Digital Story was used in the prewriting stage in which the students could generate the ideas by observing the Digital Story. Then the students organized their ideas into an outline. Here, outlining was one of activities in the prewriting stage. She asked the students to collect their outline. Then she gave comments and feedback to the outline. By this way, the students could know their mistakes. Afterwards, the drafting stage was done independently. They were allowed to ask questions to the researcher related to their writing. Then, the researcher corrected the first drafts by giving comment and feedback for their improvement. Furthermore, the revising stage could be started after the students’ first drafts were returned. They had to read their draft carefully to know their mistakes. Then they had to revise the first draft based on the comments and feedback given by the researcher. The editing stage was done by focusing on the content, language use and spelling. At last after the revising and editing stages finished, the students published their final writing by taking turns reading a load their work to their partners. The finding of the research showed that the Digital Story successfully solved the students’ writing problems and improved their writing ability in writing recount text especially in terms of content, language use and spelling. The students’ achievement reached the criteria of success set by the researcher. There were 23 students out of 28 students or 82.14% of the students reached score above the SKM. Besides, they also gave positive responses toward the utilizing of the Digital Story in the teaching and learning process. Finally, it can be concluded that the Digital Story was an interesting media that could solve students’ writing problems and improve students’ writing skill. It helped students to generate, organize and develop their ideas in writing a recount text. Furthermore, it is suggested that the English teachers should use the Digital Story to teach writing skill. For the students, it is suggested that they make outline before writing recount composition. Moreover, further researchers can implement the Digital Story to teach writing skill in other text types. Then they also can conduct the different studies which can also try to use the Digital Story to improve students’ achievement in other language skills. Moreover, it is important to provide better activities in the implementation of the Digital Story