Helping Students to Write Better through Reading and Writing Connections Strategy

Abstract

One of the causes of students’ difficulties in writing is related to the lack of knowledge on how to write. This might be caused by the lack of awareness that a piece of writing might have its own pattern or organization of ideas depending on the topic. Therefore, students need to be exposed with different kinds readings materials in order to develop their awareness on how writing is developed into differrent kinds of patterns of ideas. This study is intended to help students improve their writing achievement especially in writing an essay by integrating the reading and writing activitivities. The students involved in an integrated reading and writing activity in order to help the students develop their writing skills. This study involved 16 students of English Education Study Program who took the writing 3 course. Therefore, convinient sampling method is applied. The results of this study showed that there was an improvement in the students’ writing achievement in means from 63.3 in pretest to 79.8 in the post test. The results of the paired-sample t-test also confirmed that there is a significant difference in students’ essay writing achievement before and after they were taught by using reading and writing connections strategy. Organization of ideas, focus and detail, and voice are the aspects which were mostly developed after the treatment. Therefore, it can be concluded that reading and writing connections strategy is effective in improving students’ essay writing achievement.