JOURNAL REVIEW II - Literature Review

Hello there, welcome back to my blog!

This time i will review a journal again. But this time with different tittle and different case!

Check this out !

• Author       : Aggri Muhtia, Suparno, Sumardi
• Year           : 2018
• Publisher   : International Journal of Language Teaching and Education
• City            : Surakarta, Indonesia
• Tittle           : Blended Learning in a Paragraph Writing Course: A Case Study

Literature Review

2.1. Paragraph Writing

In academic writing, the goal of a paragraph is to support a claim or idea that helps build the whole purpose of the writing (Bryson, 2014). This implies that paragraphs play an important role in academic writing. Good paragraphing helps the reader un-derstand the text because ideas need to be organized to make them make sense, and “keeping one idea to one paragraph is the most basic rule of good paragraphing” (“Best IELTS preparation”, 2013). Zemach and Rumisek (2005) define a paragraph as “a group of sentences about a single topic” (p. 11), and the sentences explain the main idea of the topic.

Savage and Shafiei (2007) describe three elements of paragraph organization, namely the topic sentence, supporting sentences, concluding sentence. These ele-ments should be unified and need to be organized coherently. These may not be easy as students could find it challenging to find ideas to include in their writing, and thus students need clear guidance, positive feedback, and interesting ideas to write about (Zemach and Islam, 2007).

2.2. Blended Learning

Blended learning is an instructional approach which combines face-to-face learning with online learning (Garrison & Vaughan, 2008; Thorne, 2003; Macdonald, 2008). Dif-ferent scholars, however, propose different concepts about blended learning. Garrison and Vaughan (2008) assert that blended learning is not an addition of online learning into face-to-face learning but “restructuring and replacing traditional class contact hours.” Meanwhile, Thorne (2003) states that one learning type can be “a supplement to other types of training and learning” (p. 47). Among several models of blended learning in higher education identified by Twigg (2003), namely supplemental, re-placement, emporium, and buffet, Auster (2016) suggests that supplemental model and replacement model are seemingly the most relevant models of blended learning. The supplemental model seems to fit Thorne’s interpretation of blended learning while the replacement model suits the Garrison and Vaughan’s.

2.3. Process approach to writing

Zemach and Rumisek (2005) state that to create a good piece of writing a writer must go through several steps of the writing process. This process, which is called the pro-cess approach to writing, includes the steps of pre-writing, drafting, reviewing, and revising (Badger & White, 2000). Unlike the product approach which emphasizes on form, this process approach focuses on the facilitation of students’ writing. The role of a teacher is to guide learners through the writing process to develop strategies for generating ideas, drafting, and refining ideas (Hyland, 2003). He adds that this could be reached through providing pre-writing activities to generate ideas, brainstorming, and outlining.

Journal Review : The Result of Research

In this section i will show the result/the advantages of the research

The questionnaire was used in this research instrument in order to know the second aim in this research. The result of questionnaire revealed the advantages and the disadvantages of the  digital comic implementation in teaching writing of narrative text. 

1.    First Advantage

All of the students felt the benefits of using digital comic in helping them writing narrative text. All of the students (100%) agree that teaching writing of narrative text through digital comic can increase their interest.

2.   Second Advantage 

Digital comic makes the material easy to understand. All of the students (100%) confirmed this statement.

3.  Third Advantage

There are 36 students (100%) who justified that digital comic can motivate them to learn.

4.   Fourth Advantage

The digital comic implementation is digital comic can improve their creative thinking ability. All of the students (100%) agree that the use of digital comic in teaching writing of narrative text can improve their creative thinking ability.

5.  Fifth Advantage

The result of the questionnaire informed that 100% of the experimental group have a perception that digital comic can gain their attention.

6.   Sixth Advantage 

digital comic implementation, all of the students (100%) expressed that digital comic can make the students more enthusiastic about learning.

7.   Seventh Advantage 

The last, the result of the questionnaire showed that the students gave the positive response to the implementation of digital comic. Three-quarters of the students (75%) stated that digital comic is appropriate to be used in their age

Furthermore, this research also revealed the disadvantages of the digital comic implementation. For the first disadvantage of the digital comic implementation, there are 5 students (13.9%) of the experimental group said that the use of digital comic in teaching writing of narrative text can make them lazy to read the text without a picture.

The result of the questionnaire showed that there are 2 students (5.56%) argued that the use of digital comic in teaching writing of narrative text can make them speak inappropriately

Then, as the last disadvantage that was found in this research, 11 students (30.6%) of the experimental group told that the use of digital comic is not better than the other media (for example video, audio etc.) for teaching writing of narrative text.

Thus, this research has found seven advantages and three disadvantages of the digital comic implementation in teaching writing of narrative text. These findings were in line with what have been said by the other researchers and expertise

Conclusion

Based on the research questions which have been mentioned in the previous chapter, there are two conclusions made in this research. The first one is the effectiveness of using digital comic in teaching writing of narrative text. The second one is the advantages and the disadvantages of using digital comic in teaching writing of narrative text. The elaboration of each point is given below. First, the digital comic has been proven as an effective media to improve students’ writing ability in writing narrative text. This result was supported statistically by the computation of independent t-test using IBM SPSS Statistics v.24. Moreover, the experimental group scores in post test shown that their understanding of narrative text improved, especially in the content of the text. Second, the questionnaire analysis showed that the use of digital comic in teaching writing of narrative text has the big advantages than the disadvantages. The result of the questionnaire presented that all of the students agreed that teaching writing of narrative text through digital comic can increase their interest, make the material easy to understand, motivate them to learn, improve their creative thinking ability, gain their attention and make them more enthusiastic about learning. In addition,

almost all of the students agreed that the use of digital comic is appropriate for their age. Despite the advantages of digital comic which have been mentioned before, there are also some disadvantages of the digital comic implementation. The result of questionnaire revealed some students agreed that the use of digital comic in teaching writing of narrative text can make them lazy to read the text without pictures and can make them speak inappropriately. Additionally, some of them agreed that the use of digital comic is not better than the other media (for example video, audio etc.) for teaching writing of narrative text.