Abstract
One of the problems in teaching English to students in vocational high schools is how to make the students more active, creative, and critical. An alternative teaching method that can be used by teachers is Problem-Based Learning (PBL). The objective of this study is to investigate whether the use of PBL provides a significant effect on the students’ writing descriptive text. This study used a quasi-experimental design which was conducted at a vocational school in Malang. The participants of this study were class X Office Administration 1 as the experimental group consisting of 23 students and class X Office Administration 3 as the control group consisting of 23 students. The researcher gave pre-test and post-test and compared the participants’ writing scores in the control and experimental groups by using an independent sample t-test. The result of the post-test indicates that the students in the experimental group achieved a higher mean score than those in the control group on writing descriptive text. The statistical analysis reports that there was a significant difference in scores between the two groups (t = 6.99, p < 0.05). This finding indicates that PBL can be an effective method for teachers in teaching writing descriptive text.
Highlights
An effective method for teaching and learning process is required to encourage students to become more active and to have critical thinking in their learning process
The result of this study shows that the students who were taught by using Problem-Based Learning (PBL) as a teaching method could improve their descriptive writing ability more than those who were taught by using small group discussion
In conclusion, the students who were taught by using PBL achieved better scores on their descriptive writing tasks than the students who were taught by using small-group discussion
Summary
An effective method for teaching and learning process is required to encourage students to become more active and to have critical thinking in their learning process. One of the effective methods to teach writing descriptive text according to researchers (e.g., Jumariati & Irawati, 2017; Mundilarto & Ismoyo, 2017) is Problem-Based Learning (PBL). The use of this method could engage students to be more active and communicative in learning language compared to the relatively more traditional teaching methods such as lecturing, drilling, and memorizing (Jumariati & Irawati, 2017). PBL was used for medical field for the first time, nowadays PBL is used in the fields of education (Elizabeth & Zulida, 2012)
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