THE INFLUENCE OF TEACHER’S DIRECT FEEDBACK TECHNIQUE IN IMPROVING WRITING SKILLS AMONG THE SECOND GRADE STUDENTS OF AN SMK

: The objective of this research was to describe (1) the use of direct feedback technique in improving the students’ writing skills (2) the influence of direct feedback technique in improving the students’ writing skills. This research was conducted among the second-grade students of an SMK. This study was experimental research of one group pretest and post-test design. The sample of this research consisted of 32 female students. The data of this research were quantitative. The data were obtained by assessing the students’ writing through pre-test and post-test scores. The data were analyzed by using SPSS (paired sample t-test and regression). The results of the paired sample t-test showed (sig.) p 0.00 and the result of regression showed (sig.) p 0.029, it meant the hypothesis was accepted.


INTRODUCTION
English is an international language in the world. Most countries use English as their second or foreign language including Indonesia. In the English language, there are four major skills that someone needs to acquire when they want to master English, namely listening, speaking, reading and writing. Besides those skills, understanding grammar is also significant in mastering English. Grammar means the structure and system of a language. Grammar can help people to learn the English language more quickly and more efficiently. People usually learn the grammatical language when they are learning to write, that is why writing is usually thought to be the most complicated skill for foreign language learners to acquire. Even though writing skills mostly called the most complicated skill, writing is one of the four language skills that are very important in human life. The main reason is that writing is one of the ways to communicate with other people.
Since writing is important, in schools students must be taught how to write in English form as a foreign language using correct grammar and vocabulary. Thus, the students have to master it. In fact, many students cannot write in English, face difficulties when wrote some sentences, and make many grammatical mistakes in their writing such as spelling, fragment, punctuation, and organization. Some of the students also did not know how to write an English text because of their confusion about tenses and activities in a class. Thus, to help the students master English, especially in writing skills, the teacher needs to help the students using the various technique. For the examples the teacher using a peer feedback technique to improve writing skills, the teachers also using direct and indirect feedback techniques to minimize the grammatical mistakes found in student's writing such as spelling, fragment, punctuation, and organization.
In this SMK, an English teacher used direct feedback techniques in improving student's writing skills. Direct feedback is a strategy providing feedback to students to help them correct their errors. In the direct feedback technique, the teacher gives the correct form of the mistakes made by students. The direct feedback technique highlights the effectiveness, means of consultation for the student in order to master writing skills appropriately. It means that the frequency for the student to write and consult their writing and then write again become the focus of the direct feedback technique. Thus, the direct feedback technique also provides wider opportunities for interaction between the teacher and student's relationship when the learning process takes place.
Therefore, the researcher focuses on the influence of English teacher's direct feedback technique in improving writing skills among the second-grade students of the SMK

LITERATURE REVIEW Teaching
Teaching means "helping other people to learn", in general teaching, there are four general parts of the job which are "deciding what students should learn"; "helping the students to learn"; "checking whether the students have to learn"; and "taking responsibility for students welfare" (Abbatt & McMahon1985). Another expert states that teaching is "guiding and facilitating learning, enabling the learner to learn, setting the conditions for learning" (Brown, 2000, p. 7). Brown also adds that an understanding of how students learn is determined by the teaching styles, approaches, methods, and techniques used in the classroom (Brown, 2000). Ball and Forzani (2009) define teaching as "helping others to learn" to do certain things in daily activities where many people are involved regularly, in other cases more formal teaching is the activity of helping, telling or even explaining Learning Learning is "acquiring or getting of knowledge of a subject or a skill by study, experience, or instruction" but also "relatively permanent" and subject to forgetting (Brown, 2000). In line with this, Heinich, Molenda, Russel & Smaldino (2004) state that learning is a development of new knowledge, skills or attitudes as an individual interact with information and the environment.
Another expert states that learning is the acquisition of facts or procedures to be used, for example, skills or formula that are learned to be used at a later date (Mohanna, Chambers, & Wall, 2008). Learning begins long time before school; continues for even longer after school; and "happens rapidly in a great number of different ways and settings" (Pritchard, 2009, p. 1) In everyday terms, learning is a process of gaining more knowledge or learning how to do something through study, teaching, instruction or experience (Pritchard, 2009). Another definition, Rossum and Hamer (2010) state that learning is "memorizing and the ability to reproduce what memorized", this is common in the school environment.

Writing
According to Brown (2000), writing is the result of thinking, drafting and revising procedures that require specialized skills. Another definition, Hyland (2003), states that writing is a way of sharing personal meaning and emphasizing the power of individuals to construct their own views on certain topics by trying to avoid imposing their views or suggesting responses to the topic beforehand.
Writing is visible, it is a form of communication created by the hand and appealing to the eye. Even students who write agree that making interesting writing is the most difficult skill to be mastered by English students. The difficulty lies not only in generating and organizing ideas but also in translating these ideas into a readable text (Coulmas, 2003). This view is also supported by Bashyal (2009), who assumes that writing is a complex task that requires a variety of skills such as mastering vocabulary, grammar, and organization of the text.
Another expert, Balta (2018), provides additional definition of writing with a detail explanation that writing is putting the information that is selected based on goal, method, topic, and limits down on paper by structuring it through some processes such as ordering, classifying, associating, matching, criticizing, estimating, analyzing, synthesizing, and evaluating.

Direct Feedback
Fatemeh and Hussein (2017) state that most of the studies found that feedback is useful and effective in improving student writings. However, there have been feedback contentions on the effectiveness of feedback on student writings. According to Chandler (2003), direct feedback allows students to directly apply the correct form as given by their teacher, whereas the students whose mistakes are corrected indirectly do not know whether the correction of their own hypothesis is accurate.
Another expert, Ferris (2011), states that in general, feedback strategy that usually used by the teacher is direct feedback. Direct feedback is a strategy of providing feedback to students to help them correct their errors by providing the correct linguistic form for student's word, morpheme, phrase, rewritten sentence, deleted word(s) or morpheme(s) the correct form or linguistic structure of the target language. Bitchener & Ferris (2012) state that teachers and students prefer to use direct feedback because direct feedback is more helpful to writers. Direct feedback helps the students reduces the type of confusion that they may experience if they fail to understand or remember the feedback they have been given (for example, the meaning of error codes used by teachers); provides them with information to help them resolve more complex errors (for example, syntactic structure and idiomatic usage); provide direct corrections of errors made by students in writing, and direct feedback is more immediate. The Advantages of Direct Feedback Chandler (2003) found that students prefer accepting the indications and corrections of their errors. The students also consider that direct feedback is the easiest correction because they know the correct form directly. By knowing the correct form directly, automatically the students get faster to rewrite their draft. Bitchener & Ferris (2012) suggest that direct feedback provides explicit feedback on hypotheses that students' have been made. So the student did not confuse if they fail to understand or remember the feedback they have been given by the teacher.
Sheen in Ferris (2011) found that direct written feedback can help the students to improve focused grammatical features. Students who received direct feedback made the most accurate revisions and the largest accuracy gain not only in revision but also in subsequent writing (C. G. van Beuningen). Farrokhi (2012) found that direct feedback helps the learner in improving their grammatical accuracy students and increase the learner's mastery in detecting and minimizing errors in their writing.

RESEARCH HYPOTHESIS
Ho: There is no difference between students' writing skills before and after being taught using direct feedback techniques. Ha: There is a significant difference between students' writing skills before and after being taught using direct feedback techniques.

RESEARCH METHOD
In this research, the researcher used quantitative research. Quantitative research is "a type of research in which the researcher studies a problem that calls for an explanation about variables; collects quantifiable data and analyzes these numbers using statistics and graphs" (Clark & Creswell, 2015). In this research, the researcher used a pre-experimental research design by using one group pre-test and post-test design which consists of pre-test, treatment, and post-test. The sample of this research consisted of 32 female students. The data were obtained by assessing the students' writing through pre-test and post-test scores. The data were analyzed using SPSS (paired sample t-test and regression).

The Use of Direct Feedback Technique
This research was carried out for a month at an SMK starting from April 8, 2019, to May 16, 2019. On April 8, the teacher gave a pre-test about the material at the time, namely conditional sentence types 1, 2, 3. After giving a pre-test, the teacher gave the treatment about conditional sentence types 1, 2, 3 using direct feedback techniques. Before conducting research the researchers entered the classroom to make observations, after that the researcher gave pre-test questions to the students as many as 16 questions. The questions consisting of 10 multiple choice questions, 5 essay questions and 1 question to make a conversation. After being given the pre-test questions, at the next meeting, the teacher teaches material at that time namely the conditional sentence.
Teaching after this pre-test is called treatment. The treatment lasted for 3 times a meeting. In this treatment, the teacher teaches conditional sentences using the direct feedback technique. Direct feedback is a strategy of providing feedback to students to help them correct their errors by providing the correct linguistic form for student's word, morpheme, phrase, rewritten sentence, deleted word(s) or morpheme(s) the correct form or linguistic structure of the target language (Ferris, 2011). Teaching used direct feedback technique were very different from teaching the previous material when the researcher makes observations. a. Opening Before using the direct feedback technique, the teacher starts the class by praying and then greeting students. A few moments later the teacher informs students about the subject matter that will be discussed that day.
After using direct feedback, the teacher starts the class by praying and then greeting students. Shortly after that, the teacher asks students about their goals or wishes if they have graduated from school, then the teacher appoints several students to answer. After asking a few students, the teacher explains why asking about it and gives an explanation of the material that will be presented for the meeting at that time and the next meeting.
In the next week before starting learning, the teacher always asks students the material that was discussed at the previous meeting and asks them to make a sample of conditional sentences or complete sentences. When asking to complete the conditional sentence, the teacher gives an example "If I'm free tomorrow, I will..... If I go to the mall, I will..."

b. Main
Before using the direct feedback technique, the teacher presented the material, give examples and asks students to do some questions. From the observations when students are asked to work on the questions without supervision from the teacher, students tend to have a lot of chatting with other friends and there are even some who prefer to play mobile phones in class. On the other hand, students, who were confused about working on the questions, tend to ask other friends.
After using the direct feedback technique, the teacher presents the learning material about the conditional sentence, after that the teacher explained about the definition of a conditional sentence, how to use conditional sentences based on the type and tenses used. Then, the teacher gave examples of each type of conditional sentence and gave students the opportunity to make their own sentences using conditional sentences. If there are no students who want to make their own sentences, the teacher will assign several students in turn.
After students understand the material, the teacher gave practice about conditional sentences based on the type. When students work on questions, the teacher walked around to see the results of student work. For students who had finished working on the questions, the teacher asks them to come forward and get direct feedback. Direct feedback was given by the teacher to students one by one. In providing direct feedback, the teacher explains the mistakes made by students while providing correct answers to the student's work. Correct answers such as the use of correct tenses and the diction.
After giving direct feedback, the teacher asks the students to revise their work. If the student revision is correct, the teacher will ask students to read and make a summary about the next type of conditional sentence that will be studied at the next meeting, while waiting for other students who are in turn to consult. Based on the research, the students tend to focus more on working on questions and asking the teacher directly when experiencing difficulties.
The tendency to chat with other students is also greatly reduced compared to the condition before being given the treatment and also the effect of the teacher walking around students makes the classroom atmosphere very conducive. By applying the direct feedback technique, the students can already distinguish the use of tenses correctly. On the other hand, students are also able to make conditional sentences based on the type using their own words.

c. Closing
Before using the direct feedback technique, the teacher closed the lesson by giving a summary of what was learned that day then ends the class by praying. After used direct feedback technique, before closed the lesson with prayer, the teacher gives the students a brief explanation about material that has been given and then asks the students to repeat what the teacher said, after prayer, the teacher asks them to learn independently about the next material.

The Influence of Direct Feedback Technique
From the explanation above, the use of direct feedback technique cannot be used as the final result in this study. To see whether there is a significant influence from the use of direct feedback technique in improving writing skills among the second-grade students of the SMK, researchers processed the result data from pre-test and post-test using SPSS paired sample t-test. Based on the data collected, the descriptive statistics of pre-test and post-test is presented below: SPSS output above shows the number of pre-test and post-test respondents (N) is 32. Based on the result of 32 respondents' tests, it is found that the lowest score (minimum) of the pre-test is 10 and the lowest score in the post-test is 15, while the highest score (maximum) of the pre-test is 73 and 71 for post test. The second finding is about the range score, which is understood as a score showing the difference between the maximum and minimum scores. The finding shows that the range score is 63 at pre-test and 56 at the posttest. Another aspect is the sum of the score. The sum is the total amount of the score of both the pre-test scores of 32 students (respondents). The finding is that the sum for the pre-test is 1077 and 1521 for the posttest's sum. The last data finding is about the average score of pretest and posttest. It is found that the average of the pretest value of 32 respondents is 33.66 with a standard deviation number is 14.814 and 47.53 is the average score of the post-test with a standard deviation number is 11.618. After the researcher analyzed the descriptive statistic, in order to answer the hypothesis there is a significant difference between students' writing skills before and after being taught using direct feedback techniques, the researchers calculated the data using the SPSS paired sample t-test. Thus the results of processing data using SPSS paired sample ttest are as follows: The table above shows a summary of descriptive statistical results from the two samples studied using the pretest and posttest scores. The table shows that the average score for the pretest is 33.66, while the average for the posttest score is 47.53. The number of respondents used as a research sample in this study was 32 students. The table also shows that the standard deviation score at the pretest is 14.814 and at the posttest is 11.618. Finally, the last finding in the table is the mean std. error score. It is shown in the table that mean std. error score for pretest is 2.619 and for the posttest is 2.054.
Based on the average results above it can be seen that the pretest score of 33.66 < posttest 47.53, then descriptively means there is a difference between the average pretest and posttest score of students.
The table above indicates the score of sig. (2-tailed) is p 0.00 < 0.05, so the hypothesis is accepted. The results of data processing using paired sample tests confirm that there is an average difference between the results of the pretest and posttest, which means that there is an influence of teacher's direct feedback technique in improving writing skills among secondgrade students of SMK N 2 Sewon.
The last result the researcher analyzed data used regression, the results of ANOVA are presented below:  According to the result of ANOVA, there was a significant (Sig.) 0.029 which means that p0.029 < 0.0005 which is less than 0.05. Thus, it can be concluded that the direct feedback technique has an influence on improving writing skills among the second-grade students of the SMK.

CONCLUSION
Based on the data analysis in this research, the use of the teacher's direct feedback technique has an influence on improving writing skills among the second-grade students of the SMK.
To support this result, the researcher found that the direct feedback technique used by the teacher helps the student in improving writing skills. By using direct feedback technique the students tend to focus more on working on questions and asking the teacher directly when experiencing difficulties. The tendency to chat with other students is also greatly reduced from before being given the treatment, the students can already distinguish the use of tenses correctly, students were also able to make conditional sentences based on the type using their own words and also the effect of the teacher walking around students makes the classroom atmosphere very conducive.
The data processed used SPSS paired-sample t-test and regression shows the result that there is a significant difference between students' writing skills before and after being taught using direct techniques. The results of the paired sample t-test show the sig. p0.00 and the regression show p0.029. Thus it can be concluded that the hypothesis is accepted and there is an influence in the use of direct feedback technique in improving writing skills among the second-grade students of the SMK.