STUDENTS’ PERCEPTION OF USING STORYBIRD APPLICATION IN

IMPROVING STUDENTS’ NARRATIVE WRITING SKILL

A. INTRODUCTION

Writing is an important life skill for anyone, especially college students. They can present
their thoughts successfully to others if they can write well - in college, in the workplace, and
in their personal lives (Kirszner and Mandell, 2011). They may be required to write a single
paragraph, an essay exam, a brief paper, or a lengthy research project in college. It is highly
reinforced by Zemach and Rumisek (2005), who state that writing is an essential aspect of
university education. They could compose a message, a proposal, or a report at work. In their
personal lives, individuals may write a letter or an email requesting information or pointing
out an issue that needs to be resolved, or they may just leave a remark on blog.

Writing ability is required for written communication. Students must explain their
thoughts in writing, put them on paper, and edit them (Saputro, 2013). Writing, on the other
hand, is a difficult talent to perfect. Language components of writing include content,
grammar, vocabulary, and punctuation (Fitriani et al, 2019). One of the writing components
that discusses how authors may think creatively and develop their thoughts to gather all
information into the communicative message is content (Pratama, 2012). Grammar is the
sentence structure. Grammar will assist individuals in comprehending the meaning of the
statement (Ameliani, 2019)

The most prevalent issue that students confront is developing a concept. If the kids have
come up with a concept, they will know what to write. Another challenge that pupils confront
is a lack of vocabulary. Students' ability to write well will be hampered by a lack of
vocabulary. If they lack vocabulary, they will repeatedly utilize the same terms in their
writing. It will make their writing boring. They also don't comprehend how to organize the
content they are going to write.
There are many different types of texts taught, including descriptive, recount, narrative,
explanation, procedure, and report. The researcher then selects the narrative text as the
research topic.

The narrative text focuses on unique participants who convey an entertaining story. Its
social role is to entertain or amuse people by telling stories about past occurrences (Syafitri et
al, 2021). Students may become bored during learning activities if they rely solely on text-
only handbooks devoid of engaging material. Students require more fascinating information,
such as visuals in the tale, to prevent boredom in their learning activities, and it increases
students' attention and focus in absorbing this narrative text material. The media that can be
used is Storybird.

Storybird is a medium that may be used. Storybird is one of the numerous free writing
tools and resources accessible on the internet (Andriani and Wahyuni, 2018). Storybird is one
of the website 2.0 tools that allow students to be more creative and innovative while
composing narratives. Storybird also provides several options to begin a story writing
process in a fun way. The professor and students merely need to join and register on the
website (Anita, 2016). Teachers can build their own class groups with Storybird. Teachers
can assign tasks to students via the class group, and students can submit them via the class
group. Only peers can access student-written stories.

Students’ ability in writing at UIN MAHMUD YUNUS BATUSANGKAR can be said to

be medium. Based on the result of interview with some of the students there are some
problems that students face in learning writing. They have difficulties in finding some
vocabularies because they have not mastered the vocabularies completely. They do not
understand correct spelling. They do not know how to write the correct sentence. This
research is to find out the students’ ability in writing narrative text taught by using and
without using storybird at the
B. REVIEW OF RELATED LITERATURE

1. RELEVANT THEORIES
a. Writing
There are four skills in the English language that should be learned by students.
One of them is writing. Writing is the most difficult of the four fundamental abilities.
Then, according to Sulistyo (2013), writing is the most challenging since individuals
must pay attention to spelling, words, grammar, or structure. Writing, according to
Anggraini et al. (2014), is an alternate means of expressing our ideas that involves several
interrelated parts of language such as vocabulary, grammar, paragraphs, organization,
punctuation, spellings, capitalizations, and so on. According to Setiawan, et al (2020)
writing is a process of putting through ideas in word then combine into sentences in a
form of paragraph in which every sentence is related one to another. According to
Saputro (2013), writing is one technique to express what is on our minds. We must have
an idea of what we are going to write before we begin. Writing entails conveying our
thoughts, putting them on paper, and revising them.
b. Narrative Text
According to Pratama (2012), narrative text is about what is happening or what
has happened. Narration is usually written in chronological sequence. The purpose of
narrative text is to tell what happened or retell the events. There are some language
features of narrative text such as defined characters, descriptive language, dialogue, and
use of simple past tense.
c. Storybird Web
Mark Ury designed Storybird, which debuted in 2010. Storybird has been
extended multiple times. Poetry application introduced it in 2013. Then, in 2014, it was
given the Longform Book, which allowed it to compose a long tale with numerous
chapters, similar to a book, and the appearance was also enhanced (Arianti, 2018).
According to Andriani and Wahyuni (2018), one of the free writing-related tools and
resources available on the web is storybird.
According to Anita (2016), Storybird is a website 2.0 tool that allows kids to be
more creative and innovative in their story writing. Storybird, an online writing platform,
helps users improve their literacy abilities by providing a variety of reading resources,
lessons, and writing tasks using visual storytelling (Setyowati et al, 2019). Everyone has
access to Storybird, even if they use a fictitious ID. It may be used to write a tale jointly
or to share personal stories with others. Each "Storybird" narrative is presented as a
digital booklet with individual pages. The author may design a cover for his stories and
post them on his account. Once shared, others may read and comment on the stories. The
author can also ask other users to collaborate on or modify his narrative.
Furthermore, Nizhamuddin (2019) claims that Storybird has four advantages: it
can increase creativity, it can train students' writing skills, it has understandable features,
and it can be done in groups simultaneously in the classroom or outside the classroom
with Wi-Fi access. Based on the explanations above, the researcher can conclude that
there are some benefits of storybird, such as students being able to easily develop their
ideas because of the artwork, storybird providing discussion boxes for students to discuss
each other, students collaborating with other students or writers to write stories, and
students being more creative in writing narrative text.
According to Nurdi (2017), storybird has various drawbacks. First and foremost,
storybird requires a reliable and fast internet connection. Second, a new user must
provide an e-mail address when signing up for the first time. Third, the various artwork
offered by the artists is restricted in quantity; students are only permitted to select
photographs for a single illustrator for a book, which restricts the amount of options..

2. Relevant Studies
The first journal that is relevant to this research is a research conducted by Refika
Andriani and Devi Wahyuni (2018) entitles “Improving Students’ Writing Skill in
Narrative Text by Using Storybird at Grade X Teknik Komputer Jaringan 1 of SMK
Yayasan Pendidikan Persada Indah (YPPI) Tualang.” The research conducted was
classroom action research.
There were two kinds of collected data, which are quantitative and qualitative.
The technique for collecting the quantitative data was a writing test and qualitative data
were gathered through observation and field notes. This research was conducted by using
two cycles. Based on the test results, there was an improvement after the storybird
treatment. The students’ improvement was found in their writing narrative text average
score that 71.70 in the based score, 72.30 in cycle 1, and 85.30 in cycle 2.
The second journal that is relevant to this research is a research conducted by
Christianti Tri Hapsari, Femy Seniwegiasari and Nur Alviyanti Fauzi (2016) entitles “The
Effectiveness of Storybird Platform for Improving Students’ Writing Skill in Recount.”
Research conducted was experimental research. There was a significant difference in
writing skills between the students of the experimental group and those of the control
group. It can be seen from the final scores of the experimental group and the control
group. The mean of pre-test of the experimental got 67.40 and the control group got
70.40. After two treatments that gave by the researchers in the experimental group, the
post-test score of the experimental group becomes higher than the control group, where
the experimental group got 79.00 and the control group got 74.00
The third journal that is relevant to this research is a research conducted by Fuad
Abdullah, Soni TantanTandiana and Risma Amelia (2020) entitles “Storybird-Based
Narrative Writing Activities among Indonesian EFL Learners: Focusing on
Contributions.” The present study utilized a descriptive case study to depict the
contributions of exerting storybird to the Indonesian EFL learners’ narrative writing
activities. This research was carried out in one of the junior high schools in Tasikmalaya,
West Java, Indonesia. The study unitized a semi-structured interview to gain the data.
The question was performed in Bahasa Indonesia. The co-instrument was a smartphone.
Thus, the interview practices were audio-recorded with this smartphone. This study puts a
heavy emphasis on delineating the contributions of storybird to learning writing English
narrative texts. Five major findings are thematically outlined. (1) storybird generates the
learners’ ideas for writing a story, (2) it facilitates them to construct the generic structure
of English narrative texts, (3) it allows them to consider the lexicogrammatical features of
English narrative texts, (4) it encourages them to produce English narrative texts joyfully
and (5) it stimulates them to write English narrative texts actively.
C. METHODS

1. Research Type and Design

This is an experimental research. According to Creswell (2012) experiment is testing an
idea to determine whether it influenced an outcome or dependent variable. In this research, the
researcher used a quasi-experimental design. Quasi-experiments are experimental situations in
which the researcher assigns, but not randomly, participants to groups because the experimenter
cannot artificially create groups for the experiment (Creswell, 2012).
Quasi experimental design is also an experimental research design that does not provide
for full control of potential confounding variables primarily to compare groups (Johnson, 2014).
The researcher used a quasi-experimental because the researcher just compares groups based on
the variables in this research. For this research, the writer collected quantitative data from pre-
test and post-test that used two groups as a sample, they were experimental class and control
class that was compared in order to determine the effect of using storybird web on students’
ability in writing narrative text. In the experimental class, the researcher applied the treatment of
Storybird web.

2. Population and Sampling

a. Population
A population is a group of individuals who comprise the same characteristics. For
example, all teachers would make up the population of teachers, and all high school
administrators in a school district would make up the population of administrators (Creswell,
2012). The population of this research will be the students of the 5 th semester in English
Department at UIN MAHMUD YUNUS BATUSANGKAR with total of 74 studentss

b. Sample
The population of this research is 74 students. In order to take the sample, the researcher
will use simple random sampling. Simple random sampling is extensively used sampling method
in scientific research. Simple random sampling is selected for populations which are highly
homogenous where the members of the research are randomly selected to participate in the
research (Bhardwaj, 2019).
3. Technique of Data Analysis
To analyze the data, the researcher used an independent sample t-test. The researcher
used independent sample T-test because want to know the significant effect of storybird web on
students’ ability in writing narrative text at UIN MAHMUD YUNUS BATUSANGKAR. There
was any significant difference between the experimental class and control class, it was necessary
to calculate the difference size by using the eta squared formula. The formula of eta square is
expressed as follows:
2
t
Eta Squared= 2
t + ( N 1+ N 2−2 ) ¿
¿
Where:
t2 : the value of the table
N1 : number of students of the first group
N2 : number of the students of the second group

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