THE EFFECTIVENESS OF USING STORYBIRD PLATFORM TO TEACH NARRATIVE TEXT TOWARDS STUDENTS’ WRITING ABILITY AT TENTH GRADE OF SMK SORE TULUNGAGUNG

ABSTRACTSantoso, Christina Dewi (17203163088). The Effectiveness of Using Storybird Platform to Teach Narrative Text towards Students’ Writing. A Thesis of English Education Department, Faculty of Tarbiyah and Teachers’ Training, State Islamic Institute Studies (IAIN) of Tulungagung 2020. Advisor: Dr. Hj. Ida Isnawati, M.Pd.Keyword: Effectiveness, Storybird, Students’ writing ability on narrative text.Writing is a complex activity for EFL learners, especially for Vocational High School students. Students often face some difficulties in making their writing especially in English. Their difficulties are caused by inability of students to construct a sentence, and make it into paragraph. Students often confused in understanding language features of a text. In addition, teachers have limited time to teach English since writing should be integrated with others skill,like reading, speaking, and listening. Furthermore, teachers often use conventional method which cannot attract students’ interest in learning. Nowadays, there are many technologies that can be used to make a new interesting learning circumstance, such as Storybird. Storybird is one of digital storytelling websites providing various free collections of arts. Storybird provides two options in writing, they are picture book story and long form story. Students can use one of them to create their writing and it is supported by many pictures in it. Considering the difficulties of students in writing and teachers’ method in teaching, the researcher tries to find out the effectiveness of using Storybird platform to teach narrative text towards students’ writing ability at tenth grade of SMK Sore Tulungagung.The formulation of the research question is: Is there any significant difference of students’ writing ability of narrative text between students who are taught by using Storybird platform and those who are not taught by usingStorybird platform? The purpose of this research is to know whether there is significant difference of students’ writing ability of narrative text who are taught by using Storybird platform and those who are not taught by using Storybird platform.This study used quantitative research design with quasi-experimental design. This study only used post-test. It called nonequivalent control group posttest-only. The population of the research was all the students of tenth grade class at SMK Sore Tulungagung that consist of 938 students. The sample of this research was class of X TP 1 and X TP 2 that were selected by purposive sampling. Meanwhile, the instrument used in this research was test for post-test only and was analyzed by using Mann-Whitney in SPSS 16.0.The finding showed that the rank mean of two classes had differences.For experimental group was 53.09, and for control group was 21.91. The U score was 107.500 and the W score was 810.500. The sig result was 0.000, that meant0.000 < 0.05. Thus, that the null hypothesis (Ho) is rejected and alternative hypothesis (Ha) was accepted. It can be concluded that Storybird platform is effective and it can be used as an alternative media in teaching writing narrative text.