The Effectiveness of Blog as Media in Improving The Students‟ Writing Skill of Descriptive Text (An Experimental Study of the Eight Graders of MTsN Brangsong Kendal in the Academic Year of 2013/2014

Abstract

This study aimed at comparing students‟ ability in writing descriptive text with
blogtechnique and without blog. This study is used to answer the questions: Is there
any significant difference in the achievement between the students who wrote
descriptive text with blogtechnique and the students who wrote descriptive text without
blog? And how well the students write descriptive text after being taught by using blog.
Quantitative method was used in analyzing the gathered data. The basic outline showed
that in the writing skill, the second year students in the first semester of Junior High
School are supposed to write a descriptive text, so the data weredescriptive texts
written by two classes of the second year students of MTs Brangsong Kendal as the
sample. One of them was the experimental group and the other one was the control
group. The result of the study shows that Blog technique applied in writingdescription
texts of VIIIgrade of MTs Brangsong, Kendal, actually gave contribution in improving
the students‟ skill in writing descriptive texts. This technique could be an effective
method. It is proper since there was a significant difference between the control group
and the experimental group when the study was conducted. Based on the statistical
analysis, it could be seen that the students‟ in the experimental group was improving
higher than the control group. The mean of the experimental group was higher (from
71.81to 80.11) than the control group (from 71.72 to 74.61). The t-value for two means
of post-test was 4.170; meanwhile the critical value at α = 5% was 1.67. Since the tvalue
was in the Ho rejection area, it was concluded that there is a significant
difference in the achievement between the students in control group who were not given
the treatment and the experimental group who were given the treatment (Blog
technique). By using this technique in the experimental class, the class situation was
very enjoyable, the students freely communicated to each other to share their ideas.
The writer had observed that the writing descriptive texts scores of the experimental
class were higher than those of the students who wrote descriptive text without Blog.
Keywords: Blog, Descriptive Text, WritingSkill