Abstract:
Language becomes not only a sort of means of communication, but also as
a means of reflection to the user of the language. English is an international
language which is the most commonly used to communicate by the people among
the different countries. Writing is the most difficult subject to the students. The
students of Senior High School must deal with many kinds of text. One of them is
descriptive text. Mind Mapping which was developed by world-famous brain
power expert Tony Buzan, can be used as a method in teaching writing. As a
method which can be used to increase the fullest potential of the brain, Mind
Mapping can build students’ interest to learn English and improve students’
ability in writing descriptive text. This research is conducted to find out whether
or notthere is effectiveness of using Mind Mapping to improve students’ ability in
writing descriptive text at the tenth grade students of SMA Muhammadiyah
Purworejo in the academic year of 2013/2014.
Type of this research is quantitative with an experimental method. The
population ofthis study is two classes of the tenth-grade students of SMA
Muhammadiyah Purworejo. They were 34 students for Experimental Group and
36 students for Control Group. In order to collect the data, the researcher used
purposive sampling to take the sample from the population for research, because
the researcher uses just part of the member of the sample and also due to the
limitation of the time. The independent variable is the use of mind mapping and
the students’ ability in writing is a dependent variable.The researcher used an
essay test as the instrumentThe techniques of analyzing the data are descriptive
statistics in finding mean, mode, median, standard deviation and inferential
analysis is used to prove the hypothesis test. The critical value used in test is α =
0.05
The result of the analysis shows that before giving treatment, the mean
score of pretest of ability in writing descriptive text is 58.15 and after giving
treatment is 72.21. Besides, to find out whether Ha is rejected or accepted the
researcher figures it out using the t-test. The result of t-test is 4.398. The result of
the study indicates that Mind Mapping is able to improve the students’ writing
ability. The t- score is higher than t-table (4.398 > 1.995) in the critical value of
(0.05). It means thatthe Ha is accepted and there is effectiveness of using Mind
Mapping to improve students’ ability in writing descriptive text at the tenth grade
students of SMA Muhammadiyah Purworejo in the academic year 2013/2014.
