Electronic Theses and Dissertation

Abstarct name : dina miftahul jannah student number : 1609200080002 study program : magister degree in english education department : english education title : improving students’ writing skill through reflective jounal (an experimental research at sman 1 tapaktuan) keywords: students’ writing skill, reflective journal writing this research was conducted at the first grade students of sman 1 tapaktuan, south aceh to improve students’ writing skill through reflective journal writing. as the problem of the study, the students had low ability in writing skill, they felt difficult to show and transfer their thinking into writing, they had difficulties in expressing the ideas, used inappropriate grammar and inappropriate vocabulary in writing. therefore, the researcher applied reflective journal writing strategy as the focus of research to solve this problem. the purpose was to find out whether there is any significant difference between the students who are trained through reflective journal writing and those who are not trained through reflective journal writing. the researcher also wants to know the students’ responses toward the implementation of reflective journal writing. the methodology of research is an experimental research which used quasi experimental design. there was two classes taken randomly as sample, namely experimental group and control group which consisted of 30 students of each group. the researcher used pretest, post-test, and questionnaire as the instruments. the quantitative data was obtained from the result of pretest and post-test score of students’ writing in experimental and control group. then both of scores were analized through spss program to calculate t-test. the findings of the research showed that the mean score of post-test of the experimental grop 76.73 is higher than the mean score of control class 63.10. futhermore, the result of p-value got from post-test of experimental and control group was 0.00 is less than the level of significance degree ? = 0.05. in other words, there was significant difference between the students who were trained through reflective journal writing and those who were not trained through reflective journal writing on students’ writing skill. the implications related to this research the researcher suggests the teachers to use reflective journal writing strategy to help students to be critical thinking writer and for the next researcher to use this strategy in others kinds of texts. in conclusion, the use of reflective journal writing improved students’ writing skill, especially in recount text of the first grade students at sman 1 tapaktuan, south aceh.