THE EFFECT OF USING MIND MAPPING STRATEGY ON THE STUDENTS’ SKILL IN COMMUNICATING DESCRIPTIVE TEXT IN WRITING

Abstract

The objective of this study was to examine the effect of using mind mapping strategy on the students’ skill in communicating descriptive text in writing of first grade. For this purpose the researcher selected the sample comprised 60 students studying at class VIII 1 and VIII 3 of SMP N.31 Medan. Each class consisted of 30 students. There are two groups of this study, they are experimental group and control group. The experimental group was taught by Mind Mapping strategy and control group was taught by conventional strategy. The instrument for collecting the data was writing descriptive text about favorite person. It was consisted of 100 words. After scoring the data, the data were analyzed by using t-test formula. The analysis shown that t-test is 4.61 while t-table is 2000. It means that t-test is higher than t-table with the degree of freedom 58, and the level significance 0.05. The result shows that the hypothesis of this study is accepted. In other, Mind Mapping strategy significantly affects the students’ writing skill in descriptive text.