The Effectiveness of Using Study Tour Method to Increase Students’ Skill in Writing Descriptive Text (an Experimental Research of the Eight Grade Students of SMP Takhassus Al-Qur’an Wonosobo in the Academic Year of 2010/2011).

This final project is an experimental research that aims to know the effectiveness of study tour method to increase students‘ skill in writing descriptive text. The subjects of the study were the eight grade students of SMP Takhassus Al-Qur‘an Wonosobo in the Academic Year of 2010/2011. There were two groups that were given different treatments. The experimental group was taught by using study tour method, and the control group was taught without using study tour method, but using pictures. There were four meetings for each class. One meeting was for pre-test. Two meetings were for treatments and one meeting for post-test. First, pre-test was given for the experimental and control groups. In the treatments, the students of the experimental group were invited to visit Kalianget Resort. On the other hand, the students of the control group were taught by using the pictures of Kalianget Resort in the classroom. Post-test was given after the treatments were done. There were five components that the writer analyzed to make the students easier in writing descriptive text. There were grammar, vocabulary, mechanics, fluency, and relevance. The number of students involved in this study was 52 students. The results of this research showed that the average scores of pre-test from the two groups were nearly the same. The mean of the pre-test for the experimental group was 63.69 and 63.85 for the control group. After the experimental and control groups were given different treatments, the score in the post-test of the two groups increased, in which the mean of the experimental group was 76.92 and for the control group was 70.15. It means that the results of the experimental group were higher than the control group. Therefore, study tour method is effective to increase the students‘ skill in writing descriptive text. Based on the results, the improvement of the experimental group was 13.23 and 6.3 for the control group. The result of applying t-test based on the difference of two means reveals that obtained value (2.46) is higher than t-table value for