INCREASING THE STUDENTS’ ABILITY TO WRITE DESCRIPTIVE PARAGRAPH
THROUGH VISUAL-SPATIAL INTELLIGENCE STRATEGY
(A Classroom Action Research)
CHAPTER I
INTRODUCTION
A.
Background
Language plays
an important role in human life. Language is used for communication. By using
language, someone could make statement, convey fact and knowledge explain or
report something, and keep social relation among language users. Language
acquisition is divided into four major skill, those are speaking, listening, reading
and writing. We cannot deny that writing is the difficult subject of the four
major language skills. There are many difficulties that the students face in
writing such as: content and vocabulary. They are the main factors that must be
concerned in writing.
Content is
significant aspect in writing. In content, EFL (English as Foreign Language)
students may lack the ability to express clear main ideas. The way students
form phrases often influences the audiences' understanding of the written
content. Writing in English might be difficult for EFL students because they
are not used to stating their point clearly, so their audience may not be able
to follow their intricate writing style and understand the main ideas of the
text.
Another common error in writing is namely vocabulary. Vocabulary is one of language aspect dealing with the process of writing. The writer always thinks about putting words into sentences and then putting sentences into paragraph until they can create a piece of writing. It is clear now that we cannot write or express our ideas if we are lack of vocabulary. Therefore, the students are difficult in writing because they are lack of it. Written English is linguistically different from spoken English, and it requires knowledge of lower-frequency words that students rarely or never use in speaking.
The other
factors of the students’ in writing skill is they are lack of ideas and less of
competence in organizing ideas. Sometimes students, when they are asked to
write, they do not know what they are going to write because they do not have
enough ideas to write or they cannot organize well their ideas in the form of
paragraph. Finally the students feel anxious when they attempt to write.
To solve the problems
above the teacher has to find out interesting teaching strategy and more
creative to motivate students in writing process. Therefore, one simplest way
of making writing more creative and meaningful to the students is to have the
students write something about picture, maps, charts, movies, etc. by using Visual-Spatial Intelligence strategy. Visual-spatial Intelligence is one kind of multiple intelligences theory which has been demonstrated by Howard Gardner In1980’s. Visual-spatial intelligence when used in education,
it will be a learning strategy.
Visual-Spatial Intelligence Strategy will help
the students to construct their mind to think what they are going to write. As
we know that one of the difficulty of writing is we lack of ideas. Whereas,
when the students will be commanded to write about picture, maps, charts,
movies, etc. they will have many ideas. Because of????????
