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THE USE OF PICTURE SERIES TO IMPROVE THE SECONDARY SCHOOL STUDENTS’ WRITING ACHIEVEMENT OF NARRATIVE TEXT.

This essay will discusses about the use of picture series to improve the secondary school students’ writing achievement of narrative text. In junior high school, writing is difficult problem that students face. Students always feel confuse and do not understand about what they are going to write, especially to write a narrative text. Moreover, the most suitable way to improve student writing achievement on narrative text is by using picture series. Picture series can make the students interested in writing skill. Picture series also make the students easier to catch the idea of the story, so the students will be competence to write narrative text.

Based on 2006 School Based Curriculum (KTSP) there is some materials that are arranged appropriately to develop Indonesian students’ ability to understand and create spoken and written discourse. It is manifested in four basic skills: listening, speaking, reading, and writing. Considering to those four skills, writing can be said as an uneasy skill to be mastered by the students. The objective of learning English is enable the students to communicate either in oral and written form. Thus, considering the objectives of learning English, students should mastered the four language skills.

Writing is very important also for the students, because by writing something they can express their mind. Writing is also the action for the students to discover their idea. By writing the students can produce language that comes from mind. According to (Stanley, Shimkin, Lanner;1992)the purpose of writing is to communicate about a subject to a reader. Students have feelings, knowledge, ideas about both the subject matter and the reader. Based on that theory, writing is important for the students to communicate with each other.

There are several stages that the students should do in a writing process before they can produce good writing. According to Halimatus (168:XXXX), the stages covers prewriting, organizing, drafting, revising, and editing. Prewriting stages is the process where the students should brainstorm and outline their ideas about what they are going to write. In drafting stage, students should create their initial composition by writing down all their ideas in an organized way to convey a particular idea or present an argument. Then, in revising stages students should review, modify, and reorganize their work by rearranging, adding, or deleting the content of their writing. Lastly, in editing stages students correct errors in grammar and mechanics, and edit to improve style and clarity. Having another writer’s feedback in this stage is helpful in this stage.

In English language learning, there are a variety of text that are expected to be mastered by the students, one of them is called narrative text.Narrative text is a kind of text that tellsthe reader about the stories happend in the past. It purpose is either to inform orto entertain the readers. As it tells the story ofpas event, it must be written in simple past tense. The narrative text explores;oorientation that iintroduce the participants and inform the time and the place, cimplication that describe the rising crises which the participants have to do with, and resolution that shows the way of participants to solve the crises, better or worse.

In case, students find difficulty in writing narrative text. According to Byrne (1979 : 1) writing is an activity to produce a sequence of sentences arranged in a particular order and linked together in certain ways. The students find difficultyin conveying their idea. It is not easy for the students to  produce the sentences coherently in written form. Moreover, the students cannot produce good writing yet. Therefore, the teachers are expected to be able to solve this problem.

Picture is one of media that can be use in teaching and learning process. It can be away to help the teacher to solve the student’s problem in writing. Picture is categorized as one of visual aids in language teaching. Visual aids are a situation where the learner can see what is named by the word to be learned (Allen,1983:33). There are many kind of picture that can be used in teaching learning process, such as composite picture, single picture, picture files, and picture series.

Based on the above kind of pictures, picture series is the most appropriate media that can be used by the teacher to solve the student’s problem in writing, especially in narrative text. Yunus (1981 : 51) states that picture series is a number of related pictures that are linked to form a sequence. In addition, Wright (1989 : 74) notes that picture in series is a sequence of picture  illustrating a story or a process. In other words, picture series can be said as the pictures that are organized in order and it relates to one another to illustrate a story or process. The main fuction of this kind of picture is to tell a story or sequence of event.

Therefore, the most suitable media that can be used by the teacher in the classroom based on the difficulties explained above is Picture Series. Picture series can be used to gain students attention so they can stay focus to the things they are going to write. Besides, picture is a good realia to help students elicit their ideas so they can write easily than before. As Walter (2004) states that providing visuals or realia helps contextualize instruction in the classroom, picture series will make students easier to elaborate their writing especially on narrative text. Picture series also stimulate student’s imagination. Munadi (2008) says that pictures make it easy for people to catch ideas or information conveyed in them clearly, more than if merely expressed verbally. Thus, by showing the students picture series, they will be able to build new ideas and write more as they observe and interact with the picture series.

The implementation on the use of picture series to improve students writing narrative text is determined in some stages. Firstly, the teacher introduces the material about narrative text in general to the students. Secondly, teacher show picture series to the students. The picture series contain one narrative story. Thirdly, teacher assures the students whether they understand the picture series well or not by asking them some questions related to the picture shown. Fourthly, teacher asks the students to do prewriting stage where students should brainstorm ideas and make a rough draft about the story they can get from the picture series. Fifthly, teacher asks students to organize the draft based on the picture shown. Sixthly, teacher asks students to revise their story by rearranging, adding, or deleting the content of the story. Lastly, students have to edit their story into a good narrative text by editing some language aspects of the writing such as spelling, punctuation, mechanics, and grammar. When the students finish editing their narrative text, they have to submit their work to get feedback from the teacher.

Feedback given from the teacher is in the form of score and shows some mistake students made on their writing. However, the assessment of writing is no simple task (Brown, 2003: 218). The assessment to someone’s writing can be done through holistic (impression) or analytic method. Holistic (impression) method means that the narrative texts made by the students are being examined by one or more markers (Heaton, 1990: 147). On the other hand, analytic method means that the students writing will be assessed by one marker (teacher) depends on a marking schemes which has been carefully drawn up by the examiners (Heaton, 1990: 148). There are five aspects includes to assess someone’s writing analytically, they are grammar, vocabulary, mechanics, fluency, and relevance. Those five factors will show the students improvement on their writing achievement especially on narrative text.

In conclusion, the use of picture series as the media can be determined as a suitable way to improve students writing achievement of narrative text since it can help students build new ideas and write more as they observe and interact with the picture series. The writing processes of narrative text by using picture series consist of prewriting stage, drafting stage, revising stage, and editing stage. In this case, teacher has an important role during teaching and learning process by using picture series. Teacher should give the students clear background knowledge about narrative text. Then, teacher also needs to give guidance for the students so they can write in an organized way.

Refference:

Brown, H. (2003). Language Assessment: Principles and Classroom Practices. New York: Longman.

Byrne, D. (1979). Teaching Writing Skills. Singapore: Longman Singapore Publisher pte Ltd.

Heaton, J.B. (1990). Writing English Language Tests. London and New York: Longman.

Munadi, Y. (2008). Media pembelajaran: Sebuahpendekatanbaru. Jakarta: GaungPersada Press.

Rohani, A. 1997.Media InstruksionalEdukatif. Jakarta: RinekaCipta

Walter, T. (2004).Teaching English language learners.New York: Longman

Wright, Andrew. (1989). Pictures for Language Learning. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Yunus, Nur Azlina.(1981). Preparing and using English Language Teaching, Kuala Lumpur: Oxford University Press.

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