An Analysis of Students’ Ability in Writing A Greeting Card At MTS Simpang

The purpose of this research was to investigate the students’ ability in writing a greeting card at MTs Simpang Dolok Batubara.This observation was taken 6 days which started from Monday, 11 th December 2023 to Saturday, the 16 th of December 2023. The Qualitative Research Method was used in this research. The subjects of this research chosen randomly were 7 students as the representative of students in the eight grades of Junior High School Students of MTs Simpang Dolok Batubara, academic year 2023-2024. The populations from this research were the whole students of VIII grade of MTs Simpang Dolok Batubara. Technique of collecting data used was the observation in which the students were observed during the writing class by using observation sheet designed with theory of Brown in Moh. (2019 ) to know the ability that have been achieved by the students and all the data found from 7 subjects of research that have been analyzed by the researcher there were 4 indicators/elements, namely content, vocabulary, grammar and mechanics. After the research conducted, it was found that there were 3 students with the good level in writing skill, 3 students with the fair in writing skill, and only one students categories as the unsatisfied or poor in writi skill.. Shortly, this finding of the research was appropriate with the assumption in this research that is a greeting card is effective to increase the students’ effectivity and creativity in writing.


INTRODUCTION
In English, there are four skills that should be mastered, they are listening, speaking, reading, and writing.Writing skill becomes very important in education because the student should study continuously about writing.The students need to have writing skill in their daily life to report something.They have to put words on the paper, to express and deliver their messages or ideas to other persons freely, deeply and systematically.They need to write, to conduct and accomplish the assignments given by their teacher or lecturer.In short, the writing skill plays an important role in the students' life.
Writing is one of the important skills in English because writing is a process to enlarge our knowledge by comprehending the meaning of the text.Writing needs a long process for its complex activity or process that involves a host of advance skill with included critical thinking and logical development of ideas, outlining, drafting, revising, editing, and publishing.This is why teachers have to give more attention to the students when they are teaching writing.Besides that, teachers often only use writing proficiency to measure the knowledge of their students.Therefore, students have to learn writing skills.Further, Furvana (2019) stated there are some things that the learners have to know and understand to write a text.For instance, the generic structure of the text, language features of the text, grammatical rules, word choice, way to organize a text, way to start writing, finding the ideas, and developing the ideas.Moreover, learners also have to use a technique for writing.Based on that statement, we can conclude many things must be mastered by the students if they want to create a text.
Besides that, in Curriculum K-13, students in a junior high school especially at MTs Simpang Dolok, demanded to be able to create some types of text.The types of the text which are thought to the eighth grade students are functional text and monolog text.Functional text deals with greeting card, invitation card, short message, and monolog text deal with recount, descriptive, narrative, etc.Meanwhile, greeting card is taught to the second grade students, so the second grade students of junior high school have knowledge about greeting card.The students who have learned writing subject especially in writing greeting card in junior high school did not yet showed their abilities in writing.They did not know the text organization or generic structure in greeting card.It could be seen when the teacher asked students to write a greeting card.Students still did the mistake especially in the text organization.It happened because the students seldom practiced writings.Some students were lack of vocabularies.They did not know how to develop their ideas in written text.Some students were afraid of making mistakes when the teacher gave the exercise because of the students' lack of motivation in writing greeting card.The students had to know what generic structure is and what components are in it.Students only wrote a greeting card but they did not know how to make it in orderly.
In doing this research, it is very important to clarify all terms that related to the study in order to have a clear perspective of the implementation in the field.In this research, the writer explains the theory that is related with this study.In the case, the writer is going to elaborate the terms that are important for the purpose of this study.
According to Byrne in Desrina (2013) writing is primary means of recording speech, even though it must be acknowledge as a secondary medium of communication that help up to have a good socialization, can express our ideas, feeling and our opinion so that we can have a good interaction with our society.By writing a person can express thoughts and ideas to achieve our aims.Boardman and Frydenberg (2008:2) stated that the purpose of writing is to communicate a message.Writing is much like speaking, a way to discover and communicate your ideas.Unlike speaking, however it does not happen all at once.You cannot see and hear your readers, so you must think about their reactions.Meyer had stated that writing is a way to discover and communicate the ideas in a logical order.Moreover, writing is not only focused on the product, but also on the process (Meyers, 2005:2).
Writing involves a range of writer consciousness, and needs hard process to create a good writing.For example when we want to write in a piece of paper, we have to know conceptual of writing such as content of thoughts, the style of thoughts, the organization of thoughts the purpose of thoughts and so on.It makes confuse which one strongly needed to create a good writing.
According to Yuliani and Arini (2011:110) "Greeting card is a card to express friendship or other expression." Lestari et. al. define (2014: 8) "Greeting card is card to express someone feeling".A greeting card is an illustrated, folded card featuring and expression of friendship or other sentiment.

RESEARCH METHOD
Referring the problem, the objective of the research is above "To describe the skills of the students' of MTs Simpang Dolok Batu Bara in writting Greeting Cards".

Picture 1. The Concept of the Research
The research the researcher use Descriptive Qualitative Research, descriptive research was a research which purpose to describe about something that was part into analysis that is s not statistic data.Therefore, the result of research was in the form of description and interpretation of some phenomena that exist during the research.Qualitative method is a research method used to obtain in-depth data and contains meaning, namely actual data and definite data.In qualitative research methods the instrument is the researcher himself (Suryana, 2010: 40).This qualitative research is a research method that tries to describe and interpret objects according to what happened (what it is) (Sukardi, 2013: 157).
Qualitative research methods are research procedures that produce descriptive written words from the people and behaviors studied (Moleong, 2006: 4).The research method is a research method used as a research procedure that brings descriptive data received within the form of phrases thru writing or oral from the actors of the activities observed.(Moleong, 2006: 11).
The implementation of research requires a place and subjects that will be used as an object to obtain research data that is useful to support the achievement of the objectives of the research.The important elements that can be considered in determining the research location are places, subjects, and activities.The subjects of the research are seven students of MTs Simpang Dolok Batu Bara in the second grade of junior high school or VIII Class.Sutopo (2002: 50) states that the data source in descriptive research can be humans, events or activities, places or locations, things, various pictures and records, documents and archives.Another statement about the data source in descriptive qualitative research is from.He stated that the main sources of the data in qualitative research are words and actions, and other things as the additional data like documents and many others.The instrument of data collecting that used by researcher to get the data observation There writer starts this research by doing a direct method.The researcher observes the student directly to make a greeting card.They can choose and looked for the example given by the teacher.
The documents collected are selected in accordance with the objectives and focus on the problem.There are two kinds of documents, namely exclusive documents and official documents.Personal documents are writings about a person written by him.Direct documents can be in the form of letters, diaries, letters, and stories.While official documents are those in government agencies, such as official school documents in the form of reports, staff progress lists, student progress reports and so on (Moleong, 2012: 159-160).

Technique of Analyzing Data
According to Bogdan and Biklen (in Moleong, 2006: 248), data analysis is an effort made by working with data, organizing data, sorting it into manageable units, synthesizing it, looking for and finding patterns, finding what is important and what is learned, then deciding what can be told to others.So, data analysis technique is the process of searching, processing, analyzing, and systematically compiling data obtained from the field, so as to produce results and conclusions that can provide information to others.

RESULTS AND DISCUSSION
The objective of this research is to analyze the students' writing skill in greeting cards of eighth grade of students at MTs Simpang Dolok.Moreover, observation was carried out by observing 7 students chosen as the subjects of the research in the classroom.The subject of the research was chosen randomly and the researcher asked the teacher to choose the 7 students itself, but the teacher asked me to make the small paper and the paper was filled with number and every students should take the paper to know the list of their performance.The students that had taken the first number must be the subject of the research.Their initial names were: TT, ZK, SS, DW, ZK, EZ, and NY.The learning process whereas the researcher following the writing subject in second grade of MTs Simpang Dolok: second, fulfilling and analyzing the observation sheet toward the subject of the research to know specifically their ability in writing skill.After undertaking the data, collection through observation sheet in the form of table of observation by using the theory from by Finocchiaro in Brown in Moh.Chairul & Piping (2019: 4) which had 4 elements factor to be successful on writing that are: content, vocabulary, grammar and mechanics.
Based on the data found, there were three level ability in writing skills that mostly happened in second grade students of MTs Simpang Dolok, namely.

Very Good
Based on the research the level of students that have moderate or fair ability in writing were the students that have the criteria about these kinds of things: 1. Content Their content was good present the information chosen details accross the paraghraph.It meant that there were a few noticeable error when they write a word by word.

Vocabulary
Sometimes they use good vocabulary.It meant that the vocabulary that they used could be understood by many people/listener because it still used common appropriate vocabulary.

Grammar
There is a few error in grammar.The table above was conclude from the observation sheet of the student which the score got from their ability in active content, vocabulary, grammar and mechanics.Moreover the categorize of higher was TT, NY and SS which they able for the four elements of writing skill.In the other hand, three students in fair got 10 for their score because their ability for all the types of writing skill but honestly cannot as perfect as the students in the higher speaking skill whereas they had a mistakes on punctuation and capitalization.In addition, student in the poor in writing skill is DW got 5 for their score because there so many mistakes on spelling, punctuation and capitalization.After that there is a mix in indonesian language of it.
3) In the poor/unsatisfied writing skill, there is only one student with this categories still misunderstanding for what the teacher asked for.Its means that he cannot deliver the idea naturally.He can make the sentence of greeting cards but there so many mistakes on his vocabulary, grammar and mechanic especially in capitalization and spelling.He also use indonesian language.

CONCLUSION
The greeting card can make the students be more creative to deliver their idea.This data is got from seven students' as the subject of the research with different level in writing skill there are good level, fair level and the poor level of writing skill.Student with good in writing skill got the higher score is because they were able use English language to delivered their writing on greeting card which means that student understood what the teacher commended about.They also have higher self confidence in their creativity.
Student in the fair level of writing skill there arethree students and their ability to arrange the statement in English is still mixing with Indonesia language.Sometimes, the student can understand what the teacher asked for, but they also have the error basic of grammar and mechanics.They still have error on punctuation nd capitalization.They can use English language well but not natural as well as the three students in the higher writing skill.
Student in the poor writing skill got the lower score that is five.It is showed his creativiting o writing greeting cars there is sometimes mix using Indonesia language and still out of context.It means that he still confuse to delivering his creativity in English on his writing.So that, he need to pressure himself to practice English better from active in class or always practice to writing an english sentences.