Improving students’ writing achievement using Visual Thinking strategy for junior high school students

Abstract

The aim of this study is to find out: 1) whether there is statistically significant difference of students’ writing skill in describing people between the pretest and the posttest in the implementation of visual thinking strategy, 2) which aspect improved the most after the implementation of visual thinking strategy. This research was a quantitative research. The subjects of the research were 30 students at the first grade of SMPN 1 Rawajitu Timur. The writing test was administered as the instrument of the research. The data were analyzed by using Paired Sample T-test in which the significance level was determined by p<0.05.The result of the research showed that the value of significant level was 0.00<0.05. It means that there was an improvement in students’ writing ability of descriptive text after the implementation of visual thinking strategy and the aspect of writing that improved the most after the implementation of visual thinking strategy was grammar. Moreover, the mean score of posttest (70.5) was higher than the pretest (56.7) with the gain was 13.8. Overall, regarding to the results above, it can be stated that visual thinking strategy is effective to improve students’ writing skill in describing people. Keywords: visual thinking strategy, writing, describing people.