The effect of mind mapping technique on the eleventh grade of Senior High School students' descriptive writing achievement

One prewriting technique used at school in writing is known as Semi-Controlled Writing. It is the technique where the students are given the guidance in the form of guidelines to help them compose a good writing. However, it gives much focus on the writing language use rather than achieving the writing quality considering their having been assisted by Semi-Control Writing. On the other hand, mind mapping can help the students to enhance their writing quality as it helps the writer prevent from imaginative block. Through mind mapping, students can present their ideas as well as organize, select and connect those ideas in the form of a tree diagram. Therefore, in this study the writer wants to see the effect of mind mapping on the students’ descriptive writing achievement in some writing criteria. In this study, the writer used a quasi experimental nonequivalent-groups pretest-post test design. The subject of this study was the eleventh grade students of Senior High School. The writer took two classes as the samples of this experiment. The experimental group was taught using mind mapping and another was taught using semi-controlled writing. Then, the writer gave a pre test, post test and even questionnaire to the two groups. The pre test was intended to measure the students’ descriptive writing ability in some criteria before the treatments. The treatments were given three times and ninety minutes for each. The writer used post test as one of the instruments to see the students’ descriptive writing achievement in some criteria and questionnaire to know the students’ response of two techniques used. After that, the writer evaluated the students’ pre and post test of the two groups by using the analytic scoring technique, ESL Composition Profile. Their means differences were analyzed using the t-test formula to see whether there is a different significant effect of students’ writing achievement in their content, organization, vocabulary, and language use criteria. Basing on the calculation of t-test, the writer found the t observation of both groups. The t observation of content, organization, vocabulary, and language use criteria of the two groups were 1.88, 1.7, 11.49, and 1.22 while the t-table of both was 1.671. In conclusion, the result of the calculation of the students’ test in both experimental and control group shows that mind mapping yields a significant effect of writing achievement in content, organization and vocabulary criteria and gets good response in teaching writing with enjoyable and interesting atmosphere