Spreading Activation Network Model as a Tactic in Writing Task for 10th grade Students of Don Bosco Senior High School, Semarang

Abstract

ABSTRACT Writing also involves composing, which implies the ability either to tell or retell pieces of information in many forms such as narratives, description, or explanation to transform information into new texts, as in expository or argumentative writing. The act of composing can create problems for the learners, especially for the foreign language learners. Expressing new idea or writing it also can cause difficulties, because it is transforming new information or expressing it, which is also more complex in writing than telling. The objective of this study is to know how effective the spreading activation network model in solving the writing problems and also help them learning & understanding the new vocabularies of the target language The researcher chose an experimental research and two different classes randomly, but at the same level as the population. He started by giving them a task of writing; the students were freely to choose the topic they were going to use, as the pre-test. After the task was checked and returned back along with the results, the researcher taught by using the spreading activation network model and used it in conducting the writing task for class A, before that he explained what mistakes they have done in their writing task. For class B, he just explained what mistakes they have done in it. The samples were the students of those two classes. The instrument used by the researcher was only writing task. By delivering the task, he found the result of the students’ writing before and after the use of Spreading Activation Network Model. The other instruments were rubric scores by Brown and Baley and t-Test. The rubrics was used for scoring the students’ writing results of the pre-test and post test for each class, the t-Test was for knowing the mean score of each class. Based on the result, the mean score for class A was 0.6833, meanwhile for class B, the mean score was 0.258. Meanwhile the result of the mean rank, for class A, the mean rank was 37.17. For class B, the mean rank was 22.59. It means that the mean score for class A was higher than class B. Based on the scores, it can be concluded the class that used the spreading activation network model had a better improvement than the class without spreading activation network model. Since the data were abnormal, the researcher used the Mann Whitney test. Keywords: writing, Spreading Activation Network Model, T-test, Mann-Whitney test