The Effectiveness of Using Facebook Profile to Improve the Students’ Ability in Writing Descriptive text at the Tenth Grade Students of SMA N 9 Purworejo in the Academic Year 2011/2012

Abstract

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. Facebook Profile as a part of Facebook which is the most popular Social Media in the world can be used as a media in teaching writing. As a popular Social Media, Facebook can build students’ interest to learn English and can improve students’ ability in writing descriptive text. This research is conducted to find out whether or not there is effectiveness of using Facebook Profile to improve students’ ability in writing descriptive text at the tenth grade students of SMA N 9 Purworejo in the academic year of 2011/2012. This research was conducted by using experimental design and with pre-test and post-test design. Two classes of the tenth-grade students of SMA N 9 Purworejo were chosen as the sample of this research. They were 32 students for Experimental Group and 30 students for Control Group. In order to collect the data, the researcher used an essay test as the instrument. There were pre-test which was held before the researcher gave treatment to the experimental group and post-test which was held afterward. To make the data analysis, the researcher used t-test formula. The result of the tests shows that the t-test is 3.813. The result of the study indicates that Facebook Profile is able to improve the students’ writing ability. The t- score is higher than t-table (3.813 > 2.000). It means that the Ha is accepted and there is effectiveness of using Facebook Profile to improve students’ ability in writing descriptive text at the tenth grade students of SMA N 9 Purworejo in the academic year 2011/2012. The researcher hopes that this result will affect anyone who is involved in education field especially for English teacher to pay attention to the instructional media used in the classroom to make a better improvement in the teaching-learning process.