The Effectiveness of Multimodality on Student’s Ability to Write Descriptive Text

Abstract

In EFL learning, writing is considered an important skill used to convey the idea in textual form. In junior high school, students should learn basic forms of writing skills and one of those forms is descriptive writing that used to describe an object, person, or event in detail. In writing descriptive text, students should include detailed information to represent the subject that they write in their descriptive text. Therefore, it is important to develop a teaching method that supports the students to gather that information in detail. Teaching that incorporates multimodality such as picture, sound, and video is considered as a good instrument to support students in gathering details for their descriptive text. Thus, the researcher aims to study the effectiveness of teaching using multimodality toward students' skills to write descriptive text. This research used the quantitative experimental design to investigate the effectiveness of teaching using multimodality toward students' skills to write descriptive text. The study was conducted on 60 students from 7th grade at SMPN 1 Gemarang. The instruments used in this study are pretest and posttest. The data is in the form of primary data which was personally gathered during the experiments. The data is analyzed using SPSS 24.0 with an independent sample t-test to compare the difference in mean scores between control and experimental groups. The result shows that there is no significant difference between the score of pretests of the experimental and control groups with the significance of 0.977 which is more than 0.05, and the mean difference of 0,0833 means that the abilities of both classes are not significantly different. However, the score of posttests indicates that the difference is significant at 0.009 which is larger than 0.05, which implies that there are significant differences between the experimental and control group. Moreover, the mean difference of 4.0833 indicated that the experimental group took the lead after the treatment, which means that the multimodal approach is better at improving students' skills in writing descriptive text.

Keywords: Effectiveness, multimodality, descriptive writing.