ENHANCING STUDENTS’ PARAGRAPH WRITING ABILITY THROUGH COOPERATIVE LEARNING : A CLASSROOM ACTION RESEARCH AT THE ENGLISH EDUCATION DEPARTMENT, AHMAD DAHLAN UNIVERSITY YOGYAKARTA

Abstract: Cooperative learning, a technique in learning where students work together in small groups on a structured activity, has been long depicted by many as a tool that enables enhancing students’ learning for any subject and skill. It’s because in a cooperative learning setting, students can work together and share their strengths and improve the weaknesses. The presentation attempts to give a model of utilizing cooperative learning in enhancing students’ paragraph writing ability. The research uses classroom action research procedures. The subject of the study is students of semester II class I of English Education Department Ahmad Dahlan University Yogyakarta. The number of the students involved are 29 consisting of 21 female and 8 male students. The research instruments used are interviews, questionnaires, observation sheets and students paragraph writings. Qualitative and quantitative techniques are used to analyze the data. The research is conducted in two cycles, two meetings each. The cooperative learning techniques are applied at each meeting. From the analysis, it is found that there’s a significant improvement in the mean of the students’ scores from pre – test, progressing tests and post test. The research result indicates that the use of cooperative learning can enhance the students’ ability in writing paragraph. Referring to the result, it’s suggested that teachers should utilize cooperative learning technique as one of the strategies to improve students’ paragraph writing ability