Improving Students’ Writing Skill by Using Modified GIST (Generating Interaction between Schemata and Text) at Fifth Semester of Public Islamic College in Kerinci.

Every student should master how to write well for his/her academic needs. However, the students’ writing skill of class A Semester 5 of Public Islamic College was still weak. This problem was caused by lecturer’s technique in teaching. Therefore, this research was aimed at identifying the effectiveness of using modified GIST in improving the students’ writing skills. Besides, this research was also to describe the factors which influence the improvement of the students’ writing skill by using modified GIST. This research was classroom action research which contains three cycles. Each cycle involved planning, action, observation, and reflection. The instruments used in this research were observation, interview, writing task, and writing test. Observation was aimed to know both students and lecturer’s activities during the process of teaching and learning. Meanwhile speaking task and test meant to evaluate the students writing skill at the end of meeting and cycle. At the first cycle, it was found that the students were so excited having such a strategy so that they could improve their writing skill. However, the students still had some weaknesses especially in grammar and vocabulary. It was showed by the average score of the students’ writing test I , that was 66. Because the result was still not satisfied yet, so the research was continued to the second cycle. Some improvements toward teaching and learning process were made, it was shown from the average score of students writing test, which was 74. To get better result and to make the students more familiar with modified GIST, so the third cycle was done. Finally, it was found that the average of students’ writing test was 81. Some factors influenced the changes of the students’ writing skill were teaching and learning media, learning method, materials, activities, and classroom management. Based on the finding above, it is concluded that using modified GIST is an effective strategy in improving the students’ writing skill.