The Effectiveness of Using Chain Cards in Teaching Simple Present Tense to Improve the Students’ Ability in Writing Descriptive Text on the Eighth Grade Students of SMP N 32 Purworejo in the Academic Year 2011/2012

Abstract

Language becomes not only a sort of means of communication, but also as a means of reflection to the user of the language. Nowadays, it is important to improve our English language skill, because English is one of the second language which has become one of important subject at junior high schoool. One of the language skill is writing. In junior high school, one of the material is writing of descriptive text. In writing, descriptive text not only about the idea which we will bewritten in the part of text, but also grammar. Meanwhile, in junior high school, grammar is the material which is thought to be very difficult to understand. The effort made to solve this problem is by using interesting media. Using chain cards as a media can be learned by students easily and interestingly. The aim of this research is to find out whether it is effective of to teach simple present tense using chain cards to improve students‟ ability in writing descriptive text. In this research, the researcher took 62 students of the eighth-grade of SMP N 32 Purworejo in the academic year 2011/2012 as the sample. The researcher used VII B which consists of 31 students and VII E which consists of 31 students. The researcher conducted pre-test and post-test. The researcher taught simple present tense using chain cards as a treatment. Statistically, the researcher analyzed the data by using t-test separated variance. The result of this research shows that it is effective to teach simple present tense using chain cards to improve students‟ ability in writing descriptive text, since it was found that the result of t-value is 2. 99. Based on the 0.05 significant level, the value of t-table is 1.671, the computation shows that t-value is higher that ttable that is 2. 99>1.671. The research findings indicate that the students are interested in learning simple present tense using chain cards.