IMPROVING THE ELEVENTH GRADE STUDENTS’ WRITING SKILL IN DESCRIPTIVE TEXTS BY USING PICTURES MEDIA AT SWASTA GKPI MEDAN

Writing as one of the language skills is not as easy as one thinks because it needs some exact requirements to create topic sentence, controlling idea, supporting sentences, concluding sentence, etc. It is not surprising that students have difficulty in writing. The students could not describe thing, place or person because they could not express their ideas and they have limited vocabulary. Thus, they need some ways or media which could help them write descriptive texts. The teacher should be creative to search for interesting media to teach writing descriptive texts. Pictures media can help students to express and elaborate their ideas into a writing. The objectives of this study are to prove that the use of pictures media can improve the students’ skill in writing descriptive texts and to describe the responses of the students towards the use of pictures media in writing descriptive texts. The subjects of this study are the eleventh grade students of SMA Swasta GKPI Medan Class XI IPS 1 in the Academic Year of 2017/2018. In conducting this research, the writer used Classroom Action Research (CAR) as the method of research. Tests were used to gather the quantitative data. In addition, field notes and observation sheet were used to gather the qualitative data. Based on, the findings of this study, there were 4 students (12%) who passed the Mastery Minimum Criteria (Kriteria Ketuntasan Minimal) 75 in pretest, 12 students (36%) in formative test and 29 students (87%) in posttest. The result of this research revealed that there is a significant improvement of the students’ achievement from pretest, formative test and in the post test. This improvement was shown by the comparison between the students’ mean score of pretest (43.75), formative test (70.6), and posttest (84.4). Based on the questionnaire results, the students’ responses are very good. They agreed that using pictures media could improve their achievement in writing descriptive texts.  Furthermore, the students found it interesting to learn how to write descriptive texts by using pictures media. It can be seen from their full attention during the learning teaching processes. Therefore, it is recommended for the teachers to use pictures media in improving their students’ writing skill especially in writing descriptive texts.