The Effect of Matching Game Strategy on the Students’ Writing Skill of Descriptive Text. A Comparative Study at SMA 11 Merangin Jambi.

The teaching strategy of writing skill given by the teacher to motivate the students’ interest to find ideas, opinion, and their mind set generally was monotonous, rigid, and boring. Consequently, the students felt shy, afraid, and anxious to convey their ideas, opinion, and their mind set in the writing composition. The aim of this research was to reveal the effectiveness of using the matching game strategy on the students’ writing descriptive text compared with the crossword puzzle game. This research was conducted at the grade tenth of Senior High School 11 Merangin in the academic year of 2010-2011. The design of the research was quasi experimental design. The researcher gave the pre and posttest to both experimental and control group. The technique of sampling was cluster random sampling which gave the treatments to the experimental group for seven meetings. Learning achievement data were collected through the test that had been tested their validity and reliability. The data were analyzed by using T test and two ways ANOVAs. The result revealed that: (a) there was the difference of the students’ writing descriptive result between taught by using matching game strategy and the crossword puzzle game, (b) there was difference between the students’ writing descriptive result to the high English national evaluation score taught by using matching game strategy and the high English national evaluation score taught by using crossword puzzle game, (c) there was difference between the students’ writing descriptive result to the low English national evaluation score taught by using matching game strategy and the low English national evaluation score taught by using crossword puzzle game, (d) there was not interaction between the use of matching game strategy and crossword puzzle game to the students’ English national evaluation score. Nevertheless, the different students’ learning result between experimental and control class became the achievement of this research. It can be concluded that learning result of writing descriptive text taught by using matching game strategy was higher than using crossword puzzle game.