Improving the Students’ Competence in Developing a Paragraph of Discussion Texts Using Theme-Rheme Negotiation with Cooperative Learning Method

Abstract

This research analyzes the effectiveness of theme-rheme negotiation with cooperative learning method in improving the students’ competence in developing the paragraph of discussion texts and the effectiveness of teaching learning activities of paragraph writing class. This classroom action research was conducted in the English Department of Tidar University of Magelang in the academic year of 2011/2012. The subjects of this research were the fourth semester students who took writing III. To collect the research data, the writer used writing test, observation and interview while to analyze the data, she used descriptive statistics for quantitative data and constant comparative method which consisted of four stages for qualitative data. The first result shows that implementing theme rheme negotiation with cooperative learning method can improve the students’ competence in developing the paragraph of discussion texts. It can be seen from the results of writing tests. Based on Brown and Bailey’s theory in Brown (2004), it can be seen that the mean score of organization element in pre-cycle is 10.85, first cycle is 15.62, second cycle is 17.31 and the third cycle is 17.53. The second result shows that there is improvement of the effectiveness of teaching- learning activity of writing class by implementing TP-CL. The improvement can be seen from the indicators of effective teaching based on Blum in Nunan and Lamb (1996) and Creemer’s theory (1994). The results suggest that writing lecturers should introduce text-types to the students as well as how to develop the paragraph in order that they can write paragraphs coherently and various themes in order that they can write the paragraph artistically. In addition to that, the application of various cooperative learning methods can make the teaching-learning process effective.

Keywords : classroom action research, theme-rheme, cooperative learning,  paragraph development