Abstract

Writing is one of the language skills which is hard for the students to do, because this activity expects them to create written product in which they demonstrate certain ideas structurally which involve the correct grammar, spelling, vocabulary and punctuation. In competence based curriculum, students are demanded to produce written texts based on certain genres. One of the genres they should create is a descriptive text. Unfortunately, sometimes students get stuck in describing something. Because of these difficulties, some efforts have been done to solve the problems. One of them is by using pictures. The teacher used pictures to motivate students to write. The purpose of this study is to find out how well the pictures give contribution to the students in writing descriptive text. An experimental design was used to gather the data, while a quantitative approach was used to analyze them. The study was taken by the eighth year students of SMP N 13 Semarang. It was conducted in two classes, experimental class and control one. The treatment was given to the experimental class; here I took class VIII B, whereas the control one, class VIII C, received the normal treatment. The result of the analysis showed that pictures contribute greatly to the students in writing a descriptive text. It can be shown by the differences of the mean score of the post-test obtained by experimental class and control class. The mean score of post-test of the experimental class was 81.3, and the control class got 73.2. It can be inferred that pictures was very effective helping the students in writing a descriptive text. Referring to my experience in conducting the research, I offer several suggestions. First, I suggest other English teachers to use pictures as their teaching media. Second, the schools should provide more sophisticated visual aids to help students in learning English.