Improving Students ' Writing Descriptive Text Through Digital Storytelling Technique

The most difficult part of writing is students could not organize the development of their ideas and the purpose of the text.Digital storytelling is one of the multimedia to improve students' writing competency. The main objective of this research is to prove whether the digital storytelling enhances and improve students writing competency. The study uses classroom action research (CAR). The data in this study are quantitative and qualitative data. The quantitative data will be collected by using the essay test. The qualitative data will be collected by using observation, field notes, and questionnaire.The results of the use of digital storytelling in writing text significantly increased by using digital storytelling. The score of students’ writing descriptive text kept increasing from pre-test until post-test. It was proved by the data which showed that the mean of the students’ score in post-test II (86.4) was higher than the post-test I (72.2), and also higher than the pre-test (54.8). in addition, the response of student in using digital storytelling in the agree category, it can be seen from the frequencies of item 110 (52.88%).Therefore, Digital Storytelling significantly improves students’ score in writing Descriptive Text. Furthermore, it can be concluded that Digital Storytelling is effective to be used in teaching writing skill, especially in Descriptive Text.


Introduction
The subject of English writing is present throughout the teaching and learning in the education curriculum in Indonesia.Teacher in every content area can use writing as a powerful learning tool to help students' reflect on what they read, what they listen to, and work out their own thinking and through a process on paper.Furthermore, in the process of teaching and learning English as a foreign language, writing is very complex and the most crucial skill in learning English.As Richard and Renandya (2002) argued "there is no doubt that writing is the most difficult skill for second language learners to master".The difficulty of complexity writing text can be seen from students' ignorance to the mechanical requirements such spelling, punctuation in making the cohesion and the coherence of writing clearly to get the purpose of the text.Mather, et. al. (2009) state that when learning to write, students may have trouble generating content, creating organizing structures, formulating goals, executing the mechanicals aspects of writing, and revising the text and reformulating goals.Some students struggle primarily with spelling, whereas others have trouble formulating their ideas into coherent messages.Therefore, it is crucial for teachers to facilitate students with some effective techniques and tools.And one of the tools is by using multimedia to present a text.The learning media contributes to the teaching and learning process.As what Xie and Huang (2012) states "With the development of information technology and the media development, the traditional story of application in teaching is increasingly reduced, technology during the presentation of the story began to play a role, so that the way of telling the story is more and more abundant, spreading more and more widely." In line with the story, Miller (2010) states that students love putting the stories together with images and music on the computer, but before they get there, they must do the writing.Writing is thinking, so through writing, they find out what they want to say and how they want to say it in the scripts.Digital storytelling is one of the multimedia to improve students' writing competency.As Ohler (2008) defines "Digital storytelling is also an effective vehicle for teaching another kind of literacy that is becoming increasingly important as our students spend more and more time in a media-saturated culture: media literacy."Through digital storytelling, students can present the content of writing clearly, as well as the writer's purpose of the text.Considering the issues that have been described, the writer tried to use multimedia which can encourage the students to enhance and improve their writing competency in the First Year of English Language Study Program Teacher Training and Education Faculty Catholic University of Saint Thomas Medan by using Digital Storytelling.It is believed that digital storytelling provides students with a flexible learning environment where they can work collaboratively and consider the various issue critically while applying their communication and technology skills.Throughout the active learning process that digital storytelling provides, students can improve their ability to think and develop relations between the texts, story tellers, and themselves; which enhances their understanding of the issues, and their ability to listen and interact with others.

II.
Review of Literature 2.1 The Importance of Writing Kern (2000) states writing is essential to academic language learning for a number of reasons.1.In designing through writing, learners develop their ability to think explicitly about how to organize and express their thoughts, feelings, and ideas in ways compatible with envisioned readers' expectations.2. Just as reading allows learners to focus their attention on their relationships among forms, writing allows learners to create and reshape meaning through explicit manipulation of forms.Writing thus provides an excellent platform for learners to test hypotheses about the new language.By 'trying out' different words, syntactic structures, styles, and organizational patterns, and by considering the effects that such manipulation might have own meaning, learners can broaden their communicative potential in the language.
Thinking about the complex relations of forms and meaning in their own writing may in turn predispose them to be more sensitive to form or meaning relationships in the texts they read in the foreign language.3. Writing provides time for learners to process meaning.Many foreign language learners students find writing easier and less anxiety producing than speaking, simply because they have time to think.When speaking, their attention is divided among many things, including the development of an idea, the mapping of that idea onto appropriate structures (and perhaps silent rehearsal of the utterance), and the monitoring of conversational turns so that they can find an appropriate place to interject their comments.While these processes operate smoothly when one is speaking one's native language, they are less efficient when one is learning a new language.When writing, students need not worry about turns, pronunciation, or keeping an idea (and its articulation) rehearsed in memory.They are free to take the time they need to get their message across in a form they find acceptable.Furthermore, when they are given the chance to express and respond to ideas in writing, students are often able to engage more effectively in subsequent oral discussions because their ideas have already been at least partially developed and articulated, allowing them to focus more attention on their oral delivery.4. Writing allows learners' language use to go beyond purely 'functional' communication, making it possible to create imagined worlds of their own design.Hale, et. al. (2008) state that good writing does not rely on grammatical and lexical accuracy but also on the creativity in context and the logical flow of sentences.In order to write coherent, well-structured and essays, the writers have to be creative and concentrate on the content as well.First, teachers can help students raise their awareness of how to organize English writing, and how units of sentences and paragraphs are connected with one another to form meaningful text.By recognizing the importance of coherency in their writing, the students can dedicate themselves to the ideas or message that they are trying to convey.

Digital Storytelling Technique
Kengue and Jared (2015) define "digital storytelling is a technique that forces students to decide the (impressive and tell able) stories, and to solve the problem of processing the digital story that combine visuals, linguistics, music, and narration to achieve desired outcomes.Hence, digital storytelling requires and improves the skills of synthesis, creativity, conducting research, and critical thinking."Lee (2017) explains that a digital story allows students to work individually or in small groups to produce a digital project that combines writing, digital images, and digital video.A digital story is a personal narrative (about a personal experience or personal reflection on a topic) presented orally in the first person and combined with multimedia like photos, music, and other sounds.A digital story can be viewed as a merger between traditional storytelling and the use of multimedia technology.Digital storytelling is storytelling that contains computer-based images, video clips, audio narration, and texts.With the popular and easy use of computers, smart phones, tablets, digital cameras and video recorders, it is not difficult for the students nowadays to create their stories digitally with some training.Moreover, with access to the Internet and Web 2.0 tools, digital stories can be created, shared, or co authored online with anyone, anywhere.Okada and Alexandra (2012) state that digital storytelling has the potential to enhance cooperation and collaboration in the classroom, because students can be more engaged when they work together to create a digital story.According to Slavin (1996) collaborative learning leads students to encourage themselves support each other and work together to achieve an The results of the use of digital storytelling in writing text was significantly increase by using digital storytelling.The score of students' writing descriptive text kept incrasing from pre-test until post-test.It was proved by the data which showed that the mean of the students' score in post-test II (86.4) was higher than the post-test I (72.2), and also higher than the pre-test (54.8). in addition, the response of student in using digital storytelling is agree, it can be seen from the frequencies of item 110 (52.88%).

V. Conclusion
Using Digital Storytelling in Writing Texs Especially Descriptive Text was effective in Students' Faculty of English Education Program at Saint Thomas University Medan 2017/2018.After the writer analysis the data, it is found that the improvement of the students' total frome pre-test until post-test II (31,6).Therefore, Digital Storytelling significanly improves students' score in writing Descriptives Text.Furthermore, it can be concluded that Digital Storytelling is effective to he used in teaching writing skill especially in Descriptive Text.Based on the increas of the percentage, it is found out pre-test (54,8 %), post-test I (72,2 %), to post-test (86,4 %).