Applying Tell-Show Strategy Combined with Pictures to Improve Writing Skill of The Eighth-Grade Students of SMPN 2 Kuta Utara

Abstract

Writing is one of the productive language skills that students in all grades should learn. In school, writing is taught to develop and generate the students’ ideas or thoughts in written form, such as a paragraph. However, the students still had difficulties making a well-written paragraph, especially in generating and organizing their ideas in a descriptive paragraph. In addition, they did not know how to organize the paragraph in terms of generic structures, unity, and coherence. The English teacher still used a monotonous strategy in teaching writing, and it was boring to some students. The present research objective was mainly intended to find out whether the writing skill of the eighth-grade students of SMPN 2 Kuta Utara in academic year 2021/2022 can be improved through the tell-show strategy combined with pictures. The present study made use of a classroom action research design that was conducted in two cycles. The required data were collected by administering research instruments: paragraph construction tests in the pre-test and post-tests and a structured questionnaire for the study subjects. After the cyclical research processes, it was found that the tell-show strategy combined with pictures was an appropriate strategy to improve the subjects’ writing skills, primarily descriptive paragraphs. It could be seen from the results of the pre-test, post-test 1, and post-test 2, which showed significant improvement in the students’ writing skills. Furthermore, it was supported by the structured questionnaire, which showed positive responses to the implementation of the tell-show strategy combined with pictures. It can be concluded that the writing skill of the eighth-grade students of SMPN 2 Kuta Utara in academic year 2021/2022 could be improved by implementing the tell-show strategy combined with pictures.