The Increasing of Greeting Card Writing Skills Through Greeting Cards Photo Maker Application for The Viii A Grade Students in SMP Negeri 1 Plumpang Academic Year 2016/2017

Abstract

Smooth review because it is repeated, smooth running because it is taken. This proverb is interesting to describe students' writing ability in English in general. Unaccustomed students to write, making writing activities always felt difficult by most students. The difficulties that students always complain about are due to limited vocabulary and a lack of understanding of grammar. This problem is also experienced by the writer when giving assignments to write one type of functional text, namely Greeting Cards(Greeting card). This can be seen from the results of students' writing which tended to only copy existing text, mistakes in using vocabulary, punctuation, writing text structures and most of all, namely grammatical errors. Given thatgreeting cardis a type of text that can most often be applied directly in everyday life because at any time there are incidents where students can directly give greeting cards, so the
authors conducted research by simultaneously implementing one of the IT-based applications usingsmartphoneswhich has now become more interesting to students than a book, ieGreeting Cards Photo Maker. Thus, the purpose of this research is to describe the improvement of writing skillsgreeting cardthrough learning media Greeting Cards Photo Makerin class VIII A Semester II SMP Negeri 1 Plumpang, Plumpang District, Tuban Regency, 2016/2017 Academic Year. Through this research it is hoped that students will get new discourses to be able to take advantage of advances in information technology throughsmartphonesthem for positive things
related to learning activities, such as writinggreeting card. This research method is descriptive, with data collection through test and non-test instruments, observation sheets, field notes and documentation. While data analysis was carried out by analyzing the value of learning outcomes starting from the Pre-Cycle, Cycle I and Cycle II. From the results of the study showed an increase in the average value of the precycle of 63.44 to 71.56 in Cycle I and to 83.75 in Cycle II. This is also shown in the graph of the increase in the percentage of classical mastery of students, namely 21.88 % in the pre-cycle, up to 46.88% in Cycle II, and to 93.75% in Cycle II, which means that classically, students have finish on the material writing learninggreeting card. So it can be concluded that the use of application learning mediaGreeting Cards Photo Makercan significantly improve writing skills greeting card.