IMPROVING STUDENTS’ WRITING SKILL BY USING COMIC STRIPS (An Action Research at the Eight Grade of SMP Negeri 5 Surakarta in Academic Year 2012/2013)

This research aims at: 1) identifying how the use of Comic Strips can improve students’ writing skill; and 2) describing the classroom climate when Comic Strips is implemented in the writing class. The method used in this research is a collaborative action research which was conducted in two cycles at the eighth grade students of SMP Negeri 5 Surakarta from April 15th to May 8th, in which in the first cycle there were 3 meetings and in the second cycle there were 2 meetings. Each cycle consisted of four steps: planning, implementing, evaluation, and reflection. The research data were collected by using observation, questionnaire, interviews, field notes, photographs, and tests. The qualitative data were analyzed through assembling the data, coding, comparing, building interpretations, and reporting the outcomes. The quantitative data were analyzed by comparing the mean scores of the pre-test and the post-tests. The research findings show that Comic Strips could improve students’ writing skill and classroom climate of English class. The improvement of students’ writing skill includes: 1) students could develop their idea; 2) students were able to make coherence and cohesive text; 3) students could find the appropriate vocabularies; 4) students made fewer mistakes in grammar; 5) students made fewer mistakes in spelling, punctuation, and capitalization. The improvement of classroom situation includes: 1) students were always ready to have writing class immediately; 2) students developed the idea fluently without talking with other students; 3) students paid full attention to the lesson; 4) students did not take a long time anymore to write sentence; 5) students made less noisy during the lesson. The meaan score had the improvement from pretest to the post-test 2. In the pretest, the students got 64.05, while in the post test 1 they got 75.03 and in the post test 2 they got 79.93. The researcher finds that this research could i students’ writing skill and the classroom climate. It becomes one appropriate way in teaching writing