Writing skill has always formed part of the syllabus in the teaching of English. One of the basic problems in teaching foreign language is to prepare students to be able to use the target language. However, some language learners are usually afraid to write the target language. Writing activity especially writing in foreign language is difficult and needs extra skill for some students and sometimes they feel bored. Most of their reason is the method of the English teaching process is not interesting and the less of chance for taking exercises to make paragraph writing or even an essay or text. To solve this problem, the teacher should have creative activity and alternative ways. Teacher should motivate and encourage students with interesting activities, for example teachers can improve students’ writing skill by using sketch because of sketch the students are able to get many ideas or opinion and apply it in written form especially in descriptive text. The students also can see and find more vocabularies or phrases and they can imagine other vocabulary or phrases that will be used in their activities especially in making descriptive text. So that, by using sketch as a learning aid the students can improve their descriptive writing skill.
The objective of the study is to describe the improvement of students’ writing skill after being taught by using sketch. In order to achieve the objective of the study, the researcher conducted an action research as the methodology of this research. This study was conducted of the VIII B grade students of SMP H. Isriati in the academic year of 2010/2011 because their achievement in their writing is still low than other classes. The number of the students was 39 students. There were three meetings during the research. They are preliminary research, cycle test I and cycle test II and those are given after the treatment.
The result of the test showed that the students’ score in the preliminary test was 54, 60, the students’ score in the cycle I test was 64, 05, and the students’ score in the cycle II test was 71, 07.
The achievement of the test showed that the treatment was successful an effective because the result of the cycle II test was higher than the cycle I test. In line with this result, the researcher concluded that the research improved students’ descriptive writing skill.