Improving students’ writing skills on personal recount text through diary writing

Abstract

This research aimed to determine whether there was any significant improvement in students’ writing skills on recount text after the implementation of diary writing. The research was quantitative, employing a one-group pre-test and post-test design. The population of the study was the second-grade students of Junior High School 24 Bandar Lampung. The sample for this research was class 8.6, which consisted of 31 students. The writing test was administered as the research instrument. The data was analyzed using the Paired Sample T-test. It was used to prove the hypothesis in this research. The result of the T-test in this research showed that the value of the significant level was lower than the alpha level (0.00<0.05). It meant that H1 was accepted, indicating a difference in students’ writing skills after implementing diary writing. The difference showed an improvement after the implementation of diary writing. Thus, it could be concluded that diary writing could be applied to improve students’ writing skills on recount text. Based on the result of the research, it was suggested that teachers practice using diary writing as a learning material for teaching writing since the research results had shown that diary writing could effectively improve students’ writing skills on recount text.

Keywords: Writing skills, diary writing, recount text, paired sample t-test