The effectiveness of clustering technique in teaching writing at the eighth grade of MTs Raudlatul Ulum

As the compulsory subject in Indonesia, English writing may be considered as the most difficult and complicated skill among the four language skills. Nowadays, the use of traditional technique happens in the teaching of English writing. Hence, what to write about often becomes the first problem for students when they compose a text. Nevertheless, it should be mastered by junior high school students as the first step to learn composition. This study was conducted to find whether the use of clustering technique as pre-writing stage is more effective than the traditional technique. The 2010 English curriculum, the most recent curriculum used in schools in Indonesia takes genre approach. One of the genres introduced in junior high school is English descriptive text. Hence, this research also focuses on English descriptive text.
The setting of the research was MTs Radlatul Ulum as a representative school of the other rural schools in Besuki - Situbondo area that merely uses Madura language as first language (L1) while Indonesia as second language (L2) in their communication in which this problem is the cause of students. The VIII C and VIII D were chosen as the sample of this study. The experiment research was conducted by using t-test as the instrument of the research. The tests were administered to know the effectiveness of both clustering and traditional technique in teaching English descriptive text.