THE EFFECTIVENESS OF ASKfm IN TEACHINGWRITTEN DESCRIPTIVE TEXT(A Quasi-Experimental Study of the Seven Grade Students of SMPN 3 Semarangin the Academic Year 2018/2019)

The aim of this study is to find out the significant difference in the students’ writing achievement of descriptive text between the students who are taught by using ASKfm and the students who are taught by using conventional method. A quasi-experimental research was conducted to achieve the goal. The population of this research was the seventh year students of SMPN 3 Semarang in the academic year 2018/2019. Two classes were chosen as sample of this study. Those classes were VII G as the experimental group and VII E as the control group. Giving pre-test, treatments, and post-test were some activities that had been done during the research to collect the data. The experimental group was given treatments by using ASKfm as the medium. Meanwhile the control group was presented treatments by lecturing. The result of the pre-test showed that the average score of the experimental group was 63.88, and the control group was 61.38. The scores indicate that the student’s prior achievement of both group is quite similar. After getting some treatments, the score of both groups increased in their writing elements. In the post-test, the average score of experimental group was 73.13 and the control group was 66.75. The students in the experimental group made improvements in all components after being taught by using ASKfm. However, it gave significant improvement for grammar and content. The grammar’s average of the pre-test was 2.91 while the grammar’s average of the post-test was 3.52. In addition, the content’s average of the pre-test was 3.15 while the content’s average of the post-test was 3.71. In fluency, the average score of the pre-test was 2.84 while the post-test was 3.35. The vocabulary’s average of the pre-test was 3.16 while the post-test was 3.57. The last, the spelling was the smallest improvement from all the writing components. The spelling’s average of the pre-test was 3.91 while the post-test was 4.16. Moreover, the t-test calculation showed that tvalue was higher than ttable (3.587 > 1.999). Therefore it can be concluded that there was a significant difference in the post-test mean of the experimental group and control group. In conclusion, using ASKfm as a medium in teaching written descriptive text is effective.