The Use of One-Day Neighbourhood Walk to Improve the tenth Graders’ Writing Recount Text at SMA Al Amin Paciran Lamongan

By Ay. Mahfudhi

Abstract

Writing in English is considered as a difficult skill to master. In addition In the teaching writing process, the teacher sometimes finds many problems about the students. Those problems are the students find the topic given by the teacher is an uninteresting topic. The teacher asks them to write but just stay in the class. Because of this, the students will get bored easily and lazy to write English. So as a teacher should give an interesting technique to make the student interested in  developing their ability to write, especially recount text. Therefore, the researcher applied  One-day Neighborhood Walk to solve the problem. This study was intended to improve the writing ability of the tenth graders of SMA Al Amin Paciran Lamongan. Employing a collaborative classroom action research design, this study involved 25 students of 10 SMA Al Amin Paciran Lamongan in the academic year of 2013/2014. In conducting the study, the researcher collaborated with the classroom English teacher. The researcher and the collaborator worked together in planning, implementing, observing, and reflecting during the implementation of One-day Neighborhood Walk technique. The data sources were the students’ writing test, observation sheet, field notes. In addition, this study conducted in two cycles since the criteria of success were accomplished in the second cycle. Each cycle consisted of three meetings.The findings showed that the implementation of One-day Neighborhood Walk technique in teaching writing obtained average score 62.5 for cycle one and average score 77.5 for cycle two. So, it  can be concluded that teaching writing by using one-day neighborhood walk technique can improve the students’ writing recount text.

Keywords: one-day neighborhood walk, writing, recount text

English is needed for real communication among people and it is one of the international languages used all over the world. There are four skills that should be mastered in learning English. They are listening, reading, writing and speaking.

Writing is the most difficult skill to master because it transforms thought into language. It needs to arrange the ideas using appropriate language (grammar and vocabulary). Aside from, Harsyaf, Nurmaini, and Zakhwan (2009, p. 3) stated that writing involves several sub skills. Some of these are related to accuracy, i.e. using the correct forms of language. Writing accurately involved spelling correctly, forming letters correctly, writing legibly, punctuating correctly, using correct layouts, choosing the right vocabulary, using grammar correctly, joining sentences correctly and using paragraphs correctly.

However, writing is not just about accuracy. It is also about having a message and communicating it successfully to other people. To do this, we need to have enough ideas, organize them well and express them in an appropriate style. So no wonder if there are many Senior high school students are not good at their writing. They are not able to construct their written ideas well. They cannot write a composition even a simple one. They consider that writing is a complex skill because it requires full attention in the writing activity. While, writing stimulates the students’ motivation since it deals with the ability to express the ideas and opinions.

Alice Oshima and Ann Hoque(1999, p. 3) stated that writing is a process, not only a product. It means that a written text is a form of few steps, and it is well finished if the total meaning is clear to the reader. There are three stages in writing process. They are prewriting, planning or outlining, writing and revising drafts.

                 Prewriting stage is the stage of concept development. In this stage, the writer has to choose a topic and narrow it to make specific and focus, in a result, the writers can write clearly, completely and effectively.

In planning stage, the writers organize the ideas they generated by brainstorming into an outline. It has three steps. They are making sub lists, writing the topic sentence and outlining.

After prewriting in stage one, and planning in stage two, the last stage is writing and revising draft. In this stage, the writer has produced a final written. Stage three has four steps.

            The first step is to write a rough draft from the outlining. The process of this stage is writing down the topic sentence and underlining it. This will remind the writer to the focus of the paragraph. Next, the writer writes the paragraph following the outline he makes as closely as possible. Second step is revising content and organization. When revising the content, the writer changes what he has written in order to improve his writing. Then check it over for content and organization including unity, coherence, and logic. The writer can change, rearrange, add or delete the word or phrases in this step. The third step is proofreading the second draft, to check grammar, sentence structure, spelling and punctuation. Last step is writing the final copy, this step is used to correct the written text in second draft, and ready to write the final copy to hand in.

           To teaching writing especially recount text, the teacher can apply one-day neighborhood walk technique. It is one of the techniques used in Contextual Teaching and Learning ( CTL ). It is an activity done by the students outside the class or school to observe a certain object.

There are some steps to do neighborhood walk, namely:

a.    Give students tasks to find out a certain object outside of the class or school to observe.

b.   Give them a format on observation

c.    Ask them to pour out the result of their observation into the language use (narrative, recount, song, report)

d.   Ask them to report it into the classroom discussion.

The role of the teacher (outside the class) is designer, fasilitator, monitor, and evaluator/ assessor. Learning community of outdoor activities/ neighborhood walk consists of: a). Hot Spot is a place to visit, b). Observation is identifying data/ information about the hot spot, c). Discussion is questioning, discussing, sharing, d). Result is the result of the discussion/ problem solving, e). Report is oral or written report, and f). Display is poster, article, picture, poem, etc.