Abstract:
This paper reports on the effectiveness of using Diary to improve students’ achievement in writing recount text. Diary provides the teacher a teaching medium, especially in teaching writing recount text due to the fact that diary and recount text are closely the same. The diary writing can assist the students to have an improvement in writing skills and increase students’ motivation in writing. The study used quantitative and qualitative research. The research design used pre-experimental design with one group pre-test and post-test from quantitative, for qualitative approach use questionnaire. The data analysis was used Saphiro-Wilk with SPSS 16.0 with = 0.05. The tests used were normality and homogeneity test. The research collected scales questionnaire. In analysing the data, the researcher calculated the percentage. The findings revealed that the students mean pre-test score was 74.25, and the means post-test score was 83.65. After using paired sample t-test, it showed that the output of SPSS in the table above showed that the significance of 2-tailed was 0.000 and the t-table for α = 0.05. Consequently H1 was accepted because the significance value (sig 2-tailed) is less than 0.05 which means the use of diary as a teaching and learning affected the students’ recount writing skill. The conclusion of this study is diary can be employed as an alternative way to teach writing, in particular, in writing recount text. Then, diary can improve the writing skills of the eight grade students of SMPN 2 Purwadadi. The suggestion of this research is expected to provide them information regarding the effectiveness of using diary in teaching writing recount text, so the teacher can utilize alternative way or strategy in teaching writing of recount text.