BRAINSTORMING ACTIVITIES AND DEVELOPMENT OF IDEAS IN ACADEMIC WRITING: A STUDY AT THE THIRD SEMESTER OF UNDERGRADUATE STUDENTS OF ENGLISH DEPARTMENT OF IKIP MATARAM ACADEMIC YEAR 2015/2016

Abstract

This study aims to investigate the significant development of the students’ acdemic writing  after they were taught using three techniques of brainstorming activity in the third semester of English department of IKIP Mataram academic year 2015/2016. This study is an experimental research with pretest-post test group design. There were 20 students  in free writing (FW) group, 12 students in listing (L) group and 14 students in clustering (C) group invovled in the study. FW group was given treatment by using free writing technique of brainstorming; L group was taught using listing technique of brainstorming and C group was taught using clustering technique of brainstorming. Writing test and open questionaires were the instruments to collect the data. The data were analyzed by using t-Test: Paired Two samples for Means and One Way Anova. The result of the analysis indicates that:  (1) FW technique can help the students to develop their academic writing performance since the t-stat is lower than t-crit(t-stat<t-crit or -5.33124<2.093024. It means that there is a significant difference of the students’ writing performance after being taught using FW technique; (2)there is significant development of the students’ academic writing performance after being taught using L technique as the t-crit is higher than t-stat(t-crit>t-stat or 2.200985>-2.962808765); (3)there is also significant development of the students’ academic writing performance after being taught using C technique because the t-stat is lower than the t-crit score(t-stat<t-crit or -3.38369<2.160369); (4)those three techniques of brainstorming have equal effectiveness to the development of the students’ academic writing performances. This is proven by the Anova test that P score is higher than alpha 0.05(0.747>0.05). Meanwhile, the students’ perception on the techniques of brainstorming used in their prewriting activity is described based on the result of their answers on the opened-questionnairs.

Key word: Brainstorming Techniques, Freewriting, Listing, Clustering and Academic Writing.