PICTURE THIS! TEACHING WRITING BY USING PICTURES TO JUNIOR HIGH SCHOOL STUDENTS

Writing is an action of expressing feelings and ideas into a written form. It is assumed as the most difficult of the four skills, especially for children. However, it is believed that by using interesting media, such as pictures, in which the children can have a lot of fun while learning may improve the students’ skill in writing. Therefore, this study aims to find out whether the use of pictures can significantly improve the students’ writing ability. An experimental study with one group pretest-posttest design was undertaken by giving the students a pretest and a posttest. The population of this research was the whole seventh grade students at SMPN 16 Banda Aceh. Meanwhile, the sample of this study were only 18 students at classVII-4 which were chosen by using random sampling. The mean score of the pretest is 63.11, while the posttest mean score is 77. The results of the study shows that the t-test value was 9.645, while the t-table value was 2.120. This means that the t-table value was lower than the t-test value (t s = 9.645 > t t = 2.120). In conclusion, there was a significant improvement on students’ writing ability after they were taught by using pictures.  Keyword s : Writing, Picture, Descriptive Text