The Effect Of Reader’s Theater Strategy On Students’ Skills In Writing Recount Text

Writing is an effective tool to develop communication for students. By writing, students can explore everything to deliver to others. As a result, the purpose of this study was to look into the effect of the reader's theater strategy on improving students' writing skills when writing recount text. This was a pre-experimental study. This study's sample consisted of eighth-grade students from MTs Pidua Meranjat. The information was gathered using a written test and analyzed using a paired sample t-test. The findings revealed that the t-obtained (5.228) was higher than the t-table (0.692) at a significant level of p-value below 0.5. It meant that there was a significant improvement in writing recount text after having taught using the reader’s theater strategy. In conclusion, the Reader’s Theater strategy affected students in writing recount text because it offers a fun way of learning where students must complete a story by recreating the script by characterizing the text that was guided by its strategy.


INTRODUCTION
As a means of communication, writing skills must be acquired by students.Writing skills is referred to the ability to arrange ideas from one paragraph to the next and connect these ideas cohesively and coherently so that they are meaningful is referred to as writing skill.(Ramli, Suhartono, & Novita 2013).Writing is a process of developing ideas (Retnaningsih, Bindarti, & Wahjuningsih, 2014).In other words, writing skills are very important to develop ideas so that they are meaningful and can be used as tools of communication.
Nevertheless, students continue to struggle with writing.Students tend to have good ideas from reading when they are going to write down these ideas.Besides, students had experience difficulties such as unclear writing content, inaccurate word choices, and less variety of words and sentences (Sartika & Rachmanita, 2017).In short, writing is the most difficult language skill because writing is not recording vocabulary of the text but elaborating and pouring ideas into an orderly writing structure.
Various methods of investigating student competence in learning to write have been used, but these methods have been found to be less effective (Allam & Elyas, 2016;Eslami, 2014).An educator is obligated to make condussive, meaningful, enjoyable, kept thinking, interactive, and interactional classroom conditions (Krishnapatria, Kurniati, & Saefullah, 2019) so that students enjoy learning to write.When students have difficulty in writing, the teacher should use various strategies to improve students' writing skills, for example, the Reader's Theater strategy.
Researchers in English literature education recommend using the Reader's Theater strategy.This strategy helps students activate and improve their reading skills.Reader's Theater strategy is learning to read by reading aloud from a script so as to develop reading fluency for L1 and ESL/EFL students (Lekwilai, 2014).This strategy can also improve the ability to speak English so that they can communicate fluently (Moghadam & Haghverdi, 2016).In addition, the Reader's Theater strategy can improve students' writing skills, especially narrative texts.This strategy makes students actively contribute when writing stories where this strategy creates fun learning atmosphere (Arsita, Vianty, & Mirizon, 2017).
Furthermore, the Reader's Theater strategy engages students in creative writing through adding and rearranging lines in the story script and providing introductory and transitional details as students adapt literary works to drama form.Initially, readers read literary works and wrote scripts to produce original plays (Leong & Boucher, 2001).Teaching writing to EFL students in Taiwan using the Reader's Theater strategy showed a positive improvement in writing performance (Tsou, 2011).It can be concluded that the Reader's Theater strategy can promote learners' skills in reading, speaking, and writing English.
Based on information stated previously, there are gaps in the research that is carried out now, namely the text, methods, and samples.The previous study utilized a narrative text, a quasi-experimental method, and high school students, whereas this study applied recount text, a pre-experimental method, and MTs students.The writing skill of recount text was studied because the writing ability of MTs Pidua Meranjat students was still low and had difficulty expressing ideas when writing.
The formulation of the problem, "Is there any effect of the Reader's Theater strategy on improving students' writing skills in writing recount texts?'

METHODOLOGY
This study utilized a pre-experimental one group pretest-posttest design, which is an experimental design that examines one group by administering a pretest prior to treatment and a posttest following treatment.Only one group was studied in one group pretestposttest design (Sugiyono, 2013).This group was tested to see how well they could write English recount text before and after using the Reader's Theater strategy.
All eighth-grade students at MTs Pidua Meranjat Ogan Ilir Regency, South Sumatra Province were included in the study.Since there was only one class in population, population study was used in determining the sample.Class VIII MTs Pidua Meranjat was chosen as the research sample because the students in that class had the same average English score of 70-75 and low writing skills.Further, variables included in this study were the independent variable, namely the Reader's Theater strategy and the dependent variable, namely, students' writing achivement after treatment.
The written test was employed to collect data and assess the students' abilities where there were five topics about the recount text given in the test.Then each student wrote an essay from the topics provided.The written test was used to evaluate the components of sentence composition in the students' paragraphs when writing recount text.
Inter-rater reliability was applied to assess the writing test's reliability.The writers utilized Pearson Product Moment Correlation to analyze data collected from both raters after they rated the test using an analytic scoring rubric.Therefore, two raters who have experience in teaching English for at least five years and possess Master's qualifications were selected.The reliability of the test was more than 0.70 indicating that the test was reliable.To assess students' writing tests, an analytic rubric was applied in which the writing assessment covers aspects of content, organization, grammar, vocabulary, and mechanics (Brown, 2007).To test the validity of the written test, a grid of questions was made following the English syllabus for class VIII MTs about recount texts.As a result, the writing test was valid in terms of content validity.
The t-test, specifically the paired sample t-test, was employed to analyze the data in order to find significant improvements in all aspects of recount writing after giving treatment.The data was also calculated using the Statistical Package for Social Science (SPSS) version 20.

FINDINGS AND DISCUSSIONS
Based on experimental class's pretest results, the highest score was 78 and the lowest score was 20.The descriptive analysis yielded the following results: the mean was 41.14 and the standard deviation was 16.01.Meanwhile, the experimental class's posttest results showed that the highest score was 94 and the lowest score was 30.The descriptive analysis yielded the following results: the mean was 60.43 and the standard deviation was 17.14.

The Result of Pretest and Posttest Writing Experiment Class Recount Text
The outcome revealed that the significance level is 0.000.This demonstrates a significant increase in the two data sets.Furthermore, there is an increase in the experimental class students' scores between the pretest and posttest writing recount texts.The average pretest score was 41.14, while the posttest score was 60.43.This demonstrates a 19.286 difference between the pretest and posttest.Because t-obtained (5.228) was greater than t-table (0.692) at the significant level of p-value less than 0.5, it indicated that reader's theater improved students' writing skills, particularly in writing recount text.See Table 2.The finding revealed that there was a significant improvement in writing recount text after having taught using Reader's Theater strategy.The progress could occur because, after assigning the pretest to the experimental group, the writer treated them for one month using the Readers' Strategy strategy.The students' score in writing recount text could improve because they did the activities of writing in groups, read the recount text, did discussion of the recount text they read by determining the characters, setting, a sequence of events, and the end of the story.After that, they write their discussions on the whiteboard to discuss writing aspects.Then, the group representative read the corrected recount text with voice intonation, facial expressions, and simple gestures, and imitates them.Moreover, they produced writing a recount text well.
Furthermore, Readers Theater strategy provides a fun way of learning in where students must complete a story by recreating the script by characterizing the text.By using the Reader's Theater strategy, each student was encouraged to reimagine the story in their own unique way because they chose to portray the story plot, characters, and setting based on the script that was provided.As supported by Patrick (2008), the Reader's Theater strategy engages students in creative writing through adding and remaking lines in the story script and providing introductory and transitional details as they adapt literary works into dramatic form.In addition, the Reader's Theater strategy is easy to implement for memorizing scripts, easy to do, and easy to prepare and practice for English teachers and students (Wu & Yang, 2010).

CONCLUSION AND SUGGESTIONS
It is critical for teachers to expose students to writing.Since students still had problems in writing recount text, the teacher could use a different strategy to help students develop their writing skills, such as Readers Theater.Using the Readers' Theater strategy, students' ability in writing recount text could improve.They could explore the ideas based on the guidance of the Reader's Theater strategy so that they could create writing a recount text.
Further, this study should be beneficial to English teachers, students, and other researchers.Teachers can use the Readers' Theater strategy as one of several methods for improving students' writing recount texts when teaching English.It can assist students in becoming more creative in developing their imagination, which can assist them in improving their writing skills.Lastly, this study is intended to be a resource for future researchers who want to conduct a study to boost students' achievement in writing a recount text using the Readers' Theater strategy.Other researchers should conduct more sampling and provide more types of recount text in teaching and learning activities.

Table 1
displays the distribution of pretest and posttest scores in the experimental class.

Table 1 .
Distribution of Experimental Class Pretest and Posttest Scores

Table 2 .
Pretest and Posttest Statistical Data Writing Experiment Class Recount Text