Enhancing Tenth-Grade Vocational High School Students’ Writing Ability Through Genre-Based Learning

Abstract

For many students, writing is considered one of the most challenging English skills because it they have to be able to organize ideas, use appropriate vocabulary, and apply correct grammar simultaneously. This condition encouraged the writer to implement Classroom Action Research when she did teaching practice at SMKN 3 Kediri. This study aimed to explaining the implementation of Genre-Based Learning (GBL) in improving students’ writing skills in descriptive text. The subject of the study were 36 students of Culineray class X-1. The instruments used in this research were writing tests and observation sheets. The writer collaborated with her peer student who did the teaching practice at the same school. The writer was as the teacher model, while the peer as observer when she was teaching in the classroom. The teaching and learning process was conducted through the stages of Genre-Based Learning, namely Building Knowledge of the Field (BKOF), Modeling of the Text (MOT), Joint Construction of the Text (JCOT), and Independent Construction of the Text (ICOT). The findings showed that GBL helped students improve their writing skills, particularly in content organization, vocabulary usage, and grammar accuracy. The students also became more active, collaborative, and confident during the learning activities. The average scores in writing descriptive after they were taught using GBL was 85. It means they had very good writing performance.