The Effect of Using Active Learning on Students’ Writing Ability at SMP Muhammadiyah 1 Jember in The 2015/2016 Academic Year

Writing is one of the important and difficult skills of English language that must be mastered by students. Active learning is a method can be used in teaching writing skill. Estafet Writing as a technique in active learning was applied to know wether or not there is a significant effect on it.

The problem that should be answered in this research is formulated as follows. “ Is there any significant effect of using active learning on students’ writing ability at SMP Muhammadiyah 1 Jember in 2015/2016 academic year?”. The research objective is intended to investigate whether or not there is a significant effect of using active learning on students’ writing ability. Based on the research problem and the related literature, the hypothesis of this research is described as follows: using active learning has significant effect on students’ writing ability at SMP Muhammadiyah 1 Jember in the 2015/2016 academic year.

The kind of this research is an experimental research. The research design is quasi experimental design nonrandomized pre-test and post-test control group design. This research is using cluster random sampling lottery, and based on the result of lottery, class VIIC as experimental group and class VIID as control group. Each group consist of 31 students. To collect the data, the researcher uses subjective test in procedure text writing test. In order to analyze the data, students’ writing score, the t-test formula is used.

The result of the research showed that the mean score of pre-test result of experimental group was 51.62, post-test was 72.70 and the difference was 21.08. The mean score of pre-test result of control group was 48.75 post-test 54.16 and the difference was 5.41. Besides, the result from t-test formula was 5.68 and the degree of freedom (df) was 60, whereas the t-table at 5% significant level for df=60 is 2.00. It indicates that the value of the t-test in this research is higher than value of t-table (5.68>2.00). So, null hypothesis (Ho) is rejected. Thus it can be concluded that “ there is a significant effect of using active learning on students’ writing ability at SMP Muhammadiyah 1 Jember in the 2015/2016 academic year”.