IMPROVING WRITING DESCRIPTIVE TEXT THROUGH CLUSTERING TECHNIQUE
Mildayanti, Anshari Syafar , Nursehang Thamrin
Abstract
The objective of this research is to find out that the use of clustering technique has impact in improving writing skill of the eighth grade students.This research applied quasi experimental research design. The samples were chosen by using purposive sampling to assign class VIII C as the experimental group and class VIII A as the control group. Experimental group is given the treatment, while the control groups is not. The data are obtained using test; pretest and posttest and they are analyzed statistically. Pretest is used to measure prior knowledge of the students while posttest is used to measure the improvement of the students’ skill after given the treatment. The significance level is set up at 0.05 and 42 degree of freedom (df). The result of the tests shows that the mean score of the experimental group in the pretest to the posttest has increased significantly from 41.4 into 76.8. While, in control group it has only increased from 37.4 to 51.9. The t-test value is 7.12. The result of the data analysis shows that t-counted value (7.12) is greater than t-table value (2.019), it means that the hypothesis is accepted. In other word, the use of clustering technique has positive impact in improving the students’ writing skill especially in writing descriptive text.
Keywords:Clustering technique, Writing Skill, Descriptive Text.

INTRODUCTION
Learning English is not an easy thing for Indonesian people. There are still many students who cannot speak and write English well even they has been taught in school. In Indonesia, English is one of the compulsory subjects. It is clear that English is one of the subject that must be taught from junior high school to university level. The students are expected to master English skill; speaking, listening, reading and writing.
Writing skill becomes very important for the students because it is essential activity for them in their future live. Therefore, the students need more practice in order to have a good writing skill. Writing is the way how to share ideas, feelings, thoughts, and experience to the reader in written form. Writing is categorized as one of the difficult skill  for the students because to have a good writing, they must have capabilities in writing process and components of writing such as organization, vocabulary, grammar and mechanics. 
A good writing should have a certain purpose. According to Troyka (1987: 62), the purposes of writing are : (1) to express something, (2) to provide information, (3) to persuade readers, and (4) to create a literary work. The four purposes of writing contribute importantly to writers’ thought. As long as the writers aim to achieve those purposes, they will be able to make an optimal writing result not only for the writers themselves but also the readers.
Based on the basic competence of the eighth grade of junior high school, the students will deal with many kinds of the texts, such as descriptive text, recount text, narrative text, and procedure text. Specifically, the teaching of writing skills to the eighth grade students is focused more on writing descriptive text. So, the eighth grade students are expected to write descriptive text well.
Descriptive text is essentially needed for students who want to describe about something physically; a person, place, and thing. The key to write a good description is to use details that help the reader imagine the person that the writer has described. Blanchard and Cristine (1994: 57) state “The important part of writing description is using clear and affective that creates exactly the picture you want”.  So, when the students describe what a person looks like, the students write about physical characteristics such as height, weight, and hair color. There are two keys to writing good description. The first key is to use spatial order. In space order, students might describe something from top to bottom or from left to right. For example, when they describe a person, they can start with the person’s head with the person’s feet. They can describe a room from left to right, or right to left. Oshima and Hogue (2007:62) state, “Spatial order is arrangement the items in order by space”. The second key writing a good description is to use specific details. When the students describe something, they paint a picture with words. The goal is to make the reader see what they have described.
The generic structure of descriptive are identification and description. Identification contains the identification of matter that will be described. Description contains the explanation or description of the thing or person to mention a few properties. It also has language features as mentioned following. First specific participant has a certain object, common and unique (only one), for example: bandengan beach, my house, borobudur temple. Second, use adjective to clarify a noun, for example: a beautiful beach, a beautiful girl, the famous place in Palu. Third, use simple present tense to tell the facts of object descriptions. Forth, use action verbs that show an activity, for example: run, write, eat, walk, sleep.
Nonetheless, based on the preliminary observation, which has been done at school, the researcher found that the students especially the eighth grade student, faced some problems in writing descriptive text, such as they were lack of vocabulary, they were still confused how to start their writing, they didn’t know how to organize their ideas and some of them didn’t even have any idea. Another was how to use correct grammatical sentences. 
To solve these problems, it needs a creativity of the English teacher to use the suitable technique in teaching descriptive text. There are a lot of techniques and methods in teaching learning process that can motivate the student and the teacher to get the English teaching effectively. The researcher would like to propose an alternative technique it is “clustering technique”.
Clustering is a type of prewriting that allows the learners to explore many ideas as soon as they occur to the learners. Like brainstorming or free associating, clustering allows learners to begin without clear ideas. Oshima and Hogue (1999:8) state, “Clustering is brainstorming activity that can be used to generate the ideas. So, it can be concluded that clustering can explore many ideas from mind”. It is a good way to develop idea before starting the writing activity. The learners can do it on their own or with friends or classmates to try to find inspiration or ideas. In clustering technique, there are some steps adapted from Hogue (1996) ;(1) choosing a word or phrases; (2) putting the word or phrases in central; (3) circling the word or phrases; (4) writing words all around the word or phrases that associate with the word in central; and (5) connecting the new word or phrases to previous ones with lines. It is easy for the students to gathering ideas by writing many words as a keyword that relate to the topic. Considering those aspects above, the researcher believes that clustering technique can improve students writing skill.
METHODOLOGY
	This research used a quasi- experimental research design, namely the non equivalent control group design in order to figure out that clustering technique can improve the writing skill of the eighth grade students in descriptive text. Two groups were involved in this research. They are divided into an experimental group and a control group. The experimental group was given pre-test while the control group was not. Then, the researcher gave treatment to the student by applying the clustering technique while the control group was taught with general way as the teacher use. After the treatment the researcher gave the posttest to measure the effect of clustering technique to the experimental group. The design of this research proposed by Cohen, Lawrence and Keith (2007:302) as follows:
			O1	 X	O2
			---------------------
			O3 		O4

Where:
		O1 : pre-test of experimental group
		O2 : post-test of experimental group
		O3 : pre-test of control group
		O4 :post-test of control group
		X :treatment of experimental group

Every research must have population when conducting a research. Population refers to the whole objects of the research .Cresswell (2008: 151) states, “A population is a group of individuals who have same characteristic”. The population of this research is the eighth grade students, which has four parallel classes, they are VIII A, VIII B, VIII C and VIII D. In this research, the researcher used purposive sampling technique in selecting the sample because the class is homogeneous. The samples are two groups taken from the population. The student class VIII A is the control groups while the students in class VIII C is the experimental group. 
This research consists of two variables. They are independent variable and dependent variable. Ary ,Jacob, Sorenson and Razavieth (2010:37) explain, “ A variable is a construct or a characteristic that can take on different values or scores”. Independent variable of this research is clustering technique while the dependent variable is the students’ ability in writing descriptive paragraph.
 In collecting the data, the researcher used test as instrument of the research. The test consists of pre-test and post-test which were given to both experimental group and control group. The pretest is given before treatment. The pretest aims to know the students’ writing skill in descriptive paragraph before giving treatment. The post test is administered after giving the treatment. This is intended to measure the students’ progress and success that achieved after application of the treatment. The students’ scores from the pretest were compared to those from the posttest. The students were given the topic that has the same level as pretest.
The pretest and posttest were given to the students’ were written test. In scoring each item of writing descriptive text, the researcher used the scoring rubrics which was adapted from Brown (2007) as shown in table 3.1 below:

Table 3.1
Scoring rubric of writing

Aspect	Score	Performance description	
Organization
   
Identification
Description	4	Identification is complete and description are arrange with proper connectives.	
	3	Identification is almost complete and description are arrange with almost proper connectives.	
	2	Identification is not complete and description are arrange with a few misuses of connectives.	
	1	Identification is not complete and description are arrange with misuses of connectives	
Vocabulary	4	Effective choice of words and word forms	
	3	Few misuses of vocabulary and word forms but not change the meaning	
	2	Limited range confusing words and words forms.	
	1	Very poor knowledge of words, word form and not understandable.	
Grammar	4	Very few grammatical or agreement inaccuracies	
	3	Few grammatical or agreement inaccuracies but not effect on meaning	
	2	Numerous grammatical or agreement inaccuracies	
	1	Frequent grammatical or agreement inaccuracies	

Source: Adapted from Brown (2007)

FINDINGS
The researcher used test as the instrument of the research in collecting the data. It means the collecting data of the research was in form of numeric data. There were two kinds of tests in this research. They were pretest and posttest. The pretest was administered before the researcher applied treatment to know the students ability in writing. The posttest was administered after she applied the treatment. The result of each test was compared to measure whether clustering technique has effect to improve writing skill of the eight grade students at MTs or not. The results of the test are expressed as follows:
Table 2.
Experimental Group’s Score on Pretest and Posttest
No	Initials	Maximum	Standard Score	
		Score	Pretest	Posttest	
1	AA	12	33	66	
2	AL	12	33	83	
3	AN	12	33	66	
4	FT	12	50	83	
5	FTM	12	41	75	
6	HW	12	25	66	
7	JT	12	50	91	
8	MR	12	33	75	
9	IL	12	50	75	
10	MIL	12	50	83	
11	MFR	12	41	75	
12	MR	12	50	75	
13	NS	12	25	66	
14	NY	12	75	91	
15	RNH	12	75	91	
16	RS	12	41	75	
17	SA	12	41	91	
18	SW	12	25	83	
19	SM	12	25	66	
20	TR	12	41	83	
21	ZF	12	50	91	
22	ZKF	12	25	41	
Total Score	912	1691	

The table above pointed out that, There are five measure of central tendency; the minimum score, maximum score, mode, median, and mean score. The score of pre test on the experimental group; the minimum score is 25, the maximum score is 75, the mode is 50, the median is 41 and the mean score is 41. When these scores were compared to minimum completeness used of 70, there are 2 students of experimental group who passed on the pre-test. Almost all students got low score on the components being scored (organization, grammar, and vocabulary). Meanwhile, the students minimum score in the posttest is 41, the maximum score is 91, the mode is 75, the median is 75 and the mean score is 76.8. Thus, total students categorized ‘pass’ is 16 students, while the remaining six students are categorized ‘fail’.
Table 3.
Control Group’s Score on Pretest and Posttest
No	Initials	Maximum	Standard Score	
		Score	Pretest	Posttest	
1	APW	12	33	41	
2	AM	12	25	41	
3	AL	12	16	33	
4	AM	12	25	41	
5	BIR	12	25	41	
6	BS	12	25	50	
7	CJ	12	41	66	
8	FT	12	41	50	
9	IB	12	25	41	
10	LS	12	75	75	
11	MNH	12	66	75	
12	MJT	12	16	33	
13	MFR	12	41	50	
14	ND	12	33	50	
15	NR	12	33	58	
16	PW	12	41	50	
17	RR	12	41	41	
18	SU	12	50	75	
19	SM	12	33	58	
20	SH	12	41	58	
21	RZ	12	58	66	
22	SA	12	25	50	
Total Score	823	1143	

By observing the table above, the minimum score of pre test on the control group is 25, the maximum score is 75, the bimodal is 25 and 41, the median is 33 and the mean score is 37.4. The result shows that there is 1 student passed and 21 students failed. While, the students score of the control group on the posttest are the minimum score is 33, the maximum score is 75, the bimodal are 40 and 50, the median is 50, and the mean score is 51.9. It also shows that three students got passing score, while others failed. 	
After obtaining the data of both experimental group and control group in pretest and posttest, the researcher continued to count the mean deviation and score deviation .The experimental group’s deviation on the pretest and posttest;  the highest deviation (d) score is 58 and the lowest deviation is 16. The highest square deviation (d2) is 3.364 and the lowest square deviation is 256. Meanwhile, the highest deviation of control group is 25. The square deviation is 625. After getting the deviation and square deviation of control and experimental group, the research calculated the mean deviation of both the group by using the formula. Thus, the mean deviation of the experimental group is 35.4, whilst the mean deviation of the control group is 14.8. After finding out the mean deviation score of the experimental and control group, the researcher computed the standard deviation of both groups. The standard deviation of experimental group is 10.96 and crontrol group is 8.
After having the standard deviation of experimental group and control group, the researcher calculated the standard error of differences of both groups by using the formula purposed by Hatch and Farhady (1982:105). The computation shows that the standard error of differences of both groups is 2.89. Based on the value, the researcher counted the t-value to test the hypothesis. The value of t-counted  = 7.12 is obtained. Since degree of freedom of 42 (n1+ n2-2= 22 + 22 – 2 ) was not available on the t-table, the researcher counted the degree of freedom using interpolation formula and she got the value of  t-table = 2.019. 
Referring to the t-table value above, the researcher tested the hypothesis of the research by comparing the values of tcounted and ttable. Based on that result, the researcher concluded that hypothesis of this research is accepted because the value of tcounted is higher than the value of ttable.. It means that clustering technique has possitive effect on writing achievement of eighth grade students.

DISCUSSION
The finding of this research is discussed in this part. This research used a quasi- experimental research design that is the non equivalent control group design where there are two groups were involved in this research. They were divided into an experimental group and a control group. The researcher gave treatment for the experimental only. The researcher conducted the research at MTs Negeri Karya Mukti. The population is the eighth grade student. The sample was chosen by using purposive sampling technique to assign class A as the control group and class C as the experimental group. The researcher used two classes that recommended by the English teacher at that school because they still have problem in learning English. Class A consist of 22 students and class B consist of 22 students too. 
Before conducting the treatment, the researcher pretested the students. It aims to measure the ability of the students in writing. Based on the result after giving pretest, the researcher found that there were some difficulties which faced by the students in writing descriptive paragraph. Most of them did not know what they should write. They got confused when the researcher asked them to write a paragraph. Some of students still have not written anything after 10 minutes the researcher gave a topic. Another problem in writing a paragraph was mistake in grammar. Actually, many students had known the meaning of pronouns including, I, we, they, you, she, he, and it. They also could not use Has or Have correctly. For example : me have a father, hobby is watch football. The correct sentence should be I have a father, his hobby is watching football. 
The result of analysis shows that just two students who passed the minimum mastery standard. The minimum score is 25, the maximum score is 75, the mode is 50, the median is 41 and the mean score is 41. The minimum score of pre test on the control group is 25, the maximum score is 75, the mode is 25 and 41, the median is 33 and the mean score is 37.4. The result shows that there is 1 student passed and 21 students failed. It indicates that the ability of students at MTs Negeri Karya Mukti was quite low before getting the treatment.
After giving the pretest, the researcher gave treatment to the experimental group by applying clustering technique. The treatment conducted for eight meetings. The activities in these meetings were also described in the lesson plan. The class was started by saying prayer and then the researcher greeted the student. After that, the researcher stimulated the students by asking some question about descriptive text. In the first meeting, the researcher asked the students about descriptive text including the social function, the generic structure, and language feature. The researcher walked around and waited for any students who could answer it. However, no one in the class could answer it correctly and almost of them just kept silent. So, in this meeting, the researcher just focused in explaining about social function, generic structure, and language feature in descriptive text. To test their understanding about what they had learned, the researcher divided the students into groups. After that, the researcher gave a descriptive text and asked them to identify the generic structure of the text.
In the second meeting, the researcher introduced and explained about some steps in clustering technique. Firstly, making a cluster diagram. In this step the researcher gave a topic to the student and asked them to write and circle the topic in the centre of their paper and then write whatever word or phrase comes into their mind related to the topic in smaller cluster. This stage helped them in gathering ideas and also in memorizing any words in English. Secondly, making an outline of cluster. It aimed to arrange the keywords that they had written in cluster diagram. Finally, making a descriptive paragraph based on the keyword that they have arranged in the outline. As the fact, clustering technique guided the students to get many ideas about the topic and help them to organize the paragraph. The researcher gave different topic in each meeting. It aimed to improve their writing skill through clustering technique. 
At the first and second meeting, the students did not get significant improvement in their writing descriptive the text. Based on that problem, in the third meeting, firstly the researcher discussed what were their difficulties in writing. The main problems of the students were in grammar. They were still confused in using simple present tense and auxiliary such as to be (she, he, it) and has/have. To minimize this problem, the researcher explained to them about simple present tense and gave them some examples. After explaining about simple present tense, the researcher taught the students an interesting way to make them easier in using to be and have/ has. The researcher said “If you want to know the use of to be ( is, am, are) and has/have, just remember one Indonesian artist’s name Ayu Dewi. See? That’s stand for I, you, they, and we. A (I) stand for am, yu Dewi (you, they,we) for are. Then, next about Sihit, that stand for she, he, and it. So, we use Ayu Dewi (I, you, they, we) for have and Sihit ( She, he, it) for has”. In fact, the students were interested in the way the researcher taught. Furthermore, many of them started to use it correctly in making sentences. However there were some students who still needed to be guided by the researcher. 
Through that simple way, the researcher tried to check their understanding. To make them more interested she explained more through clustering technique. She made a cluster diagram contained with the explanation of to be and have/ has. After that, she asked some students who sat at the front to make a sentences orally based to be and have/ has. Many of them had been able to make correct sentences. However, there were still a few students who still could not do well. Then, the researcher guided them in making their sentences. In fact, the student interested with that example. As a result, the student started to memorize and to use to be and have/ has correctly.
In the next meetings the researcher reexplain about descriptive text and clustering technique in order to recall their memories about what they had learned before. Then, the researcher gave a topic to the student and asked them to make a descriptive text using clustering technique. In fact the students did it seriously. The result of their task showed that there were some improvements in terms of the student skill in writing descriptive text itself. Many students had been able to use auxiliary including to be and Has/Have in correct sentences, although there were still some students who still needed to be guided in making sentences. Then, a lot of students had been able to develop their ideas. It also helped them in memorizing any words in English, it can be seen that only some students who still did not know the words in English asked the researcher to translate. It really aided the students in making sentences especially in making descriptive text.
After giving the treatment, the researcher posttested both groups. The aim of the posttest is to find out the improvement of the students writing skill after the treatment. After using clustering technique, the researcher found that there is significant difference between posttest of the experimental group and control group. The minimum  score of experimental group in the posttest is 41, the maximum score is 91, the mode is 75, the median is 75 and the mean score is 76.8. While, the minimum score in the control group is 33, the maximum score is 75, the modal is 40 and 50, the median is 50 and the mean score is 51.9.
 The result shows that applying clustering technique can improve students writing skill of the eighth grade student of MTs. Based on the result of formula that was used to find out the observed t-counted and critical t-table, the researcher of the observed t-counted is 7.12 and t-table is 2.019. This result shows that the observed t-counted is higher than the critical t-table. It means the hypothesis is accepted.

CONCLUSION AND SUGGESTIONS
After collecting and analyzing the data statistically in the research, the researcher finally concluded that the use of clustering technique is effective in improving students skill in writing descriptive text of the eighth grade students at MTs. It can be drawn from the result of mean deviation of posttest in experimental group and control group. The result of data analysis shows that the t-counted () is greater than the t-table (2.019). By looking at the result of the t-counted and the t-table, it can be concluded that clustering technique has possitive effect on writing achievement of eighth grade students.
Having conducted the research, the researcher has proved that clustering technique is effective in teaching descriptive text.  The researcher provided some suggestion for the improvement of teaching learning process. Firstly, the English teachers need to try keep on applying other technique such as clustering technique, so that the students were more motivated  in the English teaching learning process. Besides, it is necessary for the English teachers to improve their quality of their English teaching in order that it matches the goal of communicative language teaching by having various kinds of activities which anable the students to produce the language both written and spoken. Secondly, the students should improve their skill in writing because they have to understand the topics that have been introduced by the teacher. The students should manage their time effectively in writing. They have to learn and rehearse writing using clustering technique in order to assist them easier to get idea.  Lastly, the other researchers may follow up this study in different contexts in order to find more actions to improve students writing skill. This study may be used as one of the reading sources before the researchers do an action research related to development of the students writing skill.

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