Effect of story maps on EFL students’ achievement in writing narrative texts

The purpose of this study was to investigate the effect of story maps used in process-approach on the achievement in writing narrative texts of junior high school students as perceived from their learning styles. A quasi-experimental design was implemented in seven meetings. Two existing second-grade classes of a junior high school in Malang City, East Java, Indonesia were selected to be experimental and control groups. The students in the experimental group were taught by using story maps when they followed process approach in writing narrative texts, while those in the control group were taught in the conventional method which was conducted through writing notes. There were 20 students in the experimental group and 13 students in the control group. Independent t-test was used to analyze the scores of both groups. The finding indicated that the difference is significant between the students’ scores in the experimental group and those in the control group in favor of the experimental group. The result also revealed that there is no significant difference in the achievement in writing narrative texts between the visual and auditory learners. Vol. 8, No. 2 September 2018 Journal on English as a Foreign Language http://e-journal.iain-palangkaraya.ac.id/index.php/jefl Effect of story maps on EFL students’ achievement in writing narrative texts Fardhila Sheli Rahmawati, Bambang Yudi Cahyono, & Mirjam Anugerahwati Journal on English as a Foreign Language, 8(2), 130-148 Copyright © 2018 by JEFL, p-ISSN 2088-1657; e-ISSN 2502-6615 131

between students' reading habits and their writing performance, which means that the worse the students' reading habits, the worse their writing skills.This is because reading is easier than writing and writing requires knowledge from reading.
That is irony since literacy including reading and writing is crucial for people living in this twenty-first century.Competitions in education, job, and many other fields are tough in this century.Care, Kim, Anderson, and Gustafsson-Wright (2017) state that literacy is a fundamental skill required by people in the 21 st century.The Indonesian government has established a program regarding literacy which is called "school literacy movement" (Gerakan Literasi Sekolah/GLS).This movement is the implementation of the policy of the Minister of Education and Culture Regulation No. 23 of 2015 on the Development of Character Education (Direktorat Pembinaan Sekolah Menengah Pertama, 2016).Therefore, activities in writing are important to improve the literacy level of Indonesian students.
English is a compulsory subject to be learned by secondary school students.Secondary schools consist of two levels: junior high school (Grades 7-9) and senior high school or vocational high school (Grades 10-12).To teach junior school students, which is the focus of this study, it is necessary to use teaching media because they are still beginners.Accordingly, this study was aimed to examine the effect of the use of story maps on EFL students' achievement in writing narrative texts.A narrative text was chosen for some reasons.The first reason is that narrative text is one of the types of texts that should be mastered besides recount, descriptive, report, and procedure texts (Badan Standar Nasional Pendidikan, 2006).
Another reason is that the social function of narrative text is to entertain the reader which makes it more fun and easier compared to other text types.Moreover, it can support the GLS program.School literacy, in the context of GLS, is aimed at making the students able to make use things intelligently through various activities including writing with the general goal of developing students' characters (Direktorat Pembinaan Sekolah Menengah Pertama, 2016).It can be inferred that any activities of literacy in this context should be linked to the character development.Therefore, narrative text is a good choice in this study since narrative texts or stories had been trusted as effective media to strengthen moral values to the readers (Rahim & Rahiem, 2012;Almerico, 2014;Turan & Ulutas, 2016).By writing narrative texts with moral values and publishing the results, the students will be able to reread their own writing as well as the writing of their classmates.
Based on the importance of writing and the benefits of narrative texts for junior high school students as stated above, we proposed to use story maps as media to improve students' achievement in writing narrative texts.Story map is a graphic organizer representing the key elements of a story, which helps students make the story framework coherrently (Buehl, 2017).A study conducted by Ibnian (2010) found that story maps could help learners produce well-organized stories with clear elements as well as develop their writing skills because they could identify the elements of the short story.Sidekli (2013) stated that story maps applied within class had an impact on the improvement of story writing skills of the teacher candidates, especially the skill in planning the stories.Story maps also help students in generating ideas, organizing texts, increasing vocabulary mastery, as well as improving students' excitement (Abidin, 2014).
Story maps are also effective for students with disabilities.A study conducted by Li (2000) found that the use of story maps and story-map based questions was effective in improving fluency in writing narrative texts of students with learning disabilities.In addition, story mapping is also feasible and low priced to be implemented.The study by Tabatabaei and Radi (2013) also found that intermediate second language learners enjoyed using story maps and the effect is not only on overall writing but also in the components of writing skills such as content, organization, and language.
Although story maps have been believed as effective media in English teaching, there were only few studies investigating the effect of story maps on writing skills.Many studies examined the effect of story maps on reading skills.Among that little number of studies in the writing class, no study is aimed at investigating its effect on students across learning styles.The studies that take junior high school students as the subjects are rarely conducted, especially in Indonesia.
The story map used in this study was adapted from Buehl (2017).This story map consists of topic, title, orientation (which includes setting, characters, and problem), complication (which consists of plot or raising actions, climax, and falling actions), and resolution (which consists of the resolution of the problem and the lesson learned).The appearance of the story map of the present study is shown in Figure 1.
Story maps had been proved effective in many studies, but the investigation of how a story map works to different students with different learning styles had not been conducted.Learning styles often become a matter in the teaching since a medium or technique could be perceived differently by students with different learning styles.Learning styles constitute one of the factors affecting students' success in language learning (Lightbown & Spada, 2017).If teachers know their students better including their learning styles, they should be able to properly choose the best technique for them.Therefore, in this study, it tried to formulate two research questions: 1. Do the students taught using story maps through process approach gain better scores in their achievement in writing narrative texts than the students taught by using the conventional approach?

METHOD
This quasi-experimental study used a factorial design.It involved two groups, experimental and control groups.Since it was factorial design, two independent variables were used: active and attribute (Latief, 2012).The active variable was story maps and the attribute variable was learning style.This study investigated the effect of story maps on the EFL students' achievement in writing narrative texts in the form of scores.There are three learning styles: visual, auditory, and kinesthetic.However, this study only examined the students' tendency towards two learning styles: visual or auditory.The kinesthetic learning style was not used because the story map does not deal with body movement.
The study used two accessible classes in a private junior high school in Malang City, East Java, Indonesia, with 20 students of experimental group and 13 students of the control group.To answer the research questions, we took the data of the students' writing scores and the data about their learning styles.Writing prompts and scoring rubrics were used to collect the students' writing scores, while the questionnaire was used to collect the data about their learning styles.Before developing the writing prompts, we developed a blueprint.Blueprint which is also called as table of specification was used to help the teacher-researcher arrange and plan the objectives, instruction, and assessment (Alade & Omoruyi, 2014).
The scoring rubric used in this study was an analytical scoring rubric adapted from Brown (2010) and Klimova (2011).The blueprint, the writing prompt, and the scoring rubric were validated before they were used.The validator of the blueprint, the writing prompts and the scoring rubric was an English lecturer specialized in writing at Universitas Negeri Malang.To make the writing prompts and the questionnaire more valid, after validating them with the experts, we also tried them out to another class in the same school and level.
Journal on English as a Foreign Language, 8(2), 130-148 Copyright © 2018by JEFL, p-ISSN 2088-1657;e-ISSN 2502-6615 136 Before implementing the treatment, the pre-test was administered and the scores were used to see the normality and the homogeneity of the data.After that, the t-test was used to see the equality of the groups.The result of the analysis of the pre-test scores showed that the data were equal.After the pretest, the treatment was implemented.The procedure of the treatment including pre-test and post-test is presented in Table 1.Following the completion of the treatment, the post-test was administered.
Since the results of the pre-test scores showed that the two groups were equal, the means of the post-test scores of the experimental and control groups were analyzed using independent t-test.The pre-test and post-test scores of the experimental and control groups are shown in Appendix 1.
After the posttest was administered, the questionnaires were given to the students to collect the data about their learning styles.The questionnaire was adapted from Pickard (2017).In the administration, it was translated into Indonesian.There are two sections in the questionnaire; the first section represents the visual learning style, while the second section represents the style of auditory learners.It means that the higher the score in the first section, the higher the students' tendency on the visual learning style.In contrast, the higher the score in the second section, the higher the students' tendency on the auditory learning style.Since there were 10 questions in each section with the score for each item ranges from 1 to 3, the lower score in each section would be 10, while the higher score would be 30.
Before the questionnaire was administered, it was checked by an expert to get validation.The validator was a lecturer of Psychology Education of Universitas Negeri Malang.After the revision based on the feedback, which was giving clearer instruction how the students should fill the blank space, the questionnaire was also tried out to the students in the same school and level, but different class.Since there were many questions about what flashcard is, the questionnaire was revised afterward by adding the definition of flashcard in the footnote.The Learning Styles Questionnaire for Visual and Auditory Learners is shown in Appendix 2.

FINDINGS
To test the hypothesis, firstly, the descriptive analysis was done to complete the statistical assumptions.Normality test and homogeneity test were done prior to the hypothesis testing in order that the type of data analysis could be determined correctly.In addition, because there were two raters that scored the students' writing, the measurement of interrater reliability was performed by using Correlation Pearson Product Moment.The result of the correlation can be seen in Table 2. Table 2 shows that the reliability coefficient is 0.884 which indicates the high level of consistency between the two raters.Before the hypothesis is tested, two assumptions must be fulfilled: the assumptions of normality and homogeneity.The first assumption was that the data should be normally distributed which can be checked using a Shapiro-Wilk test.The result of the normality test is shown in Table 3.Because the significance was above 0.05, it shows that the data were normally distributed.
In addition to checking the normality, the homogeneity of variances was also measured.Thus, the data gained from the pre-tests of the two groups were checked using Levene's test.The result of the test can be seen in Table 4.The significance of the homogeneity as shown in that table is 0.400 which is above 0.05.This means that the subjects were homogeneous.
Next, the equality of the groups should be tested to know how the posttest would be analyzed.If the groups are initially equal, the post-test would be analyzed using an independent t-test, while if they are initially different, the post-test would be analyzed using ANCOVA (Analysis of Covariance).The equality of the groups was known by comparing the means of the pre-test of both groups using independent t-test.The result of the comparison is shown in Table 5.As shown in Table 5, the p-value was 0.632 > 0.05.Thus, there was no significant difference between the two groups.In other words, both groups are initially equal.Since the data were normally distributed and homogeneous, and the groups were equal, the independent t-test was used for testing the hypothesis.
The group statistics based on the post-test is shown in Table 6, while the result of the comparison of the scores of the experimental and control groups by using independent t-test is shown in Table 7.
As shown in Table 7, the p-value is 0.022 which is under the level of significance set (0.05).In other words, the difference is significant to reject the H0.It can be inferred that there was an effect of the use of story maps on the students' achievement in writing narrative texts.Further analysis was conducted to answer the second research question.It deals with whether there is a significant difference in the students' achievement in writing narrative texts between visual and auditory learners who were taught using story maps.Before testing the difference, the statistical assumption must be fulfilled by testing the normality and the homogeneity of the data.In addition, the equality of the two groups (visual and auditory learners) was also tested to determine the type of test.The result of the normality test is shown in Table 8, while the result of the homogeneity test is shown in Table 9.Table 8 shows that the p-values for both groups were all above 0.05 (0.146 for the visual group and 0.715 for the auditory group).It means that the data were normally distributed.The p-value of the homogeneity as shown in Table 9 was 0.532 or above 0.05.It implies that the groups were homogeneous.The last is testing the difference of the groups using an independent t-test to know whether the groups were equal.The result of the test is presented in Table 10.Table 10 shows that the p-value was 0.270, above 0.05.It can be inferred that the difference was not significance which means that the groups were initially equal.Since the data were normally distributed and homogeneous, and both groups were also equal, thus independent t-test was used to analyze the data.The scores of students' post-test were analyzed to know the difference between the groups.The description about the two groups is presented in Table 11, while the result of the comparison by using independent t-test can be seen in Table 12.As presented in Table 12, the difference between visual and auditory learners was not significant since the value was 0.270 or above the level of significance which is 0.05.It means that there was not enough evidence to reject the H0.In other words, there was no difference in the achievement in writing narrative texts between visual and auditory learners who were taught by using story map.

DISCUSSION
The Effect of Story Map on Students' Achievement in Writing Narrative Texts One of the results in this study showed there was an effect of using story maps in process writing on the students' achievement in writing narrative texts.That finding supports the previous studies about the effect of story maps on the ability in writing narrative texts.Ibnian (2010) stated that story maps help students to be aware of the elements of the story like the theme, setting, characters, problem, and plots.Story maps also help them to organize their writing systematically and coherently (Buehl, 2017).The advantage of the story maps is especially in the planning stage of story writing (Sidekli, 2013).Therefore, after using story maps, the students' writings were much better, especially in terms of the content and organization.In the pre-test, some of the setting, characters, problem, plots, and resolution were missed.Furthermore, the ideas were not organized well.Some of the students did not make orientation in the beginning, but they directly told the plot.After the implementation of the treatment, most of them included the complete elements in their story and the structures (orientation, complication, and resolution) were presented completely and coherently.The organization of the idea was also better.The same things were also found in the study conducted by Abidin (2014).
The advantage of story maps on the students' writing achievement is covered in the advantage of graphic organizers.A graphic organizer with the writing steps and elements can support the students to write their first draft.It is in line with Strangman, Vue, Hall, and Meyer (2004) who state that by using graphic organizers, the students are supported to write their first draft since the elements of the essay are scaffolded in the graphic organizer.

The Effect of Story Map on Visual and Auditory Learners' Achievement in Writing Narrative Texts
Graphic organizers have been believed as helpful media, especially for visual learners.According to Leopold (2012), visual learners who tend to make categorization, classification, and organization of ideas visually would be helped using graphic organizer.Story map is one of graphic organizers which are relevant for narrative texts or story writing.However, the result of this study showed that there was no significant difference between visual and auditory learners who were taught by using story maps.Indeed, the scores of visual learners in this study were higher than the auditory learners, but the difference was not significant to reject the null hypothesis.There are some possible reasons that make visual and auditory learners gained the same scores.
First, this study only involved a small number of subjects, thus, the result of this study could not be generalized broadly.Secondly, the different effect of using graphic organizers in visual learners does not necessarily deal with their writing scores, but in other aspects that were not covered in the scoring rubrics, such as the easiness of getting the ideas, the speed of the writing, the learning atmosphere, or their motivation in writing.Third, the time perhaps was not enough to have the significant outcomes to the visual learners.Fourth, the story map indeed is effective for all learners with different learning styles.It is stated by Beneva and Mihova (2011) that story maps reinforce kinesthetic, visual, and even auditory learning styles.Fifth, there might be a problem in the instrument to collect the data about students' learning styles that was used in this study.The questionnaire only consists of 20 questions that may not accommodate all the characteristics of each learning style.Sixth, the issue about the myth of learning styles might be right.Riener and Willingham (2018) state that learning style is about the learners' preference which can be words or pictures, not about that words or pictures work better for their memories.
In addition to the effect of the story maps itself on the achievement in writing narrative texts, the benefits of other variables may also affect students writing scores.It can be inferred from the data which showed the improvement of students' achievement in writing before and after the treatment in both groups.The post-test scores of the control as well as the experimental groups were better compared to their pre-test scores.Although it was not the main issue of this study, it may be beneficial to be discussed.The most possible reason for their improvement is the use of the process-writing approach in both groups.The use of the process approach in this study was reflected in the revising, editing and publishing stages.In the revising stage, the teacher could give correction on the mistakes of the students' writing.The picture series in the writing prompts used in this study were presumed to be another factor that made the students' achievement in writing narrative texts better.However, because those factors (process-writing approach and picture-series prompts) existed in both classes, we do not have to worry they would make bias in the result of the research.This additional discussion attempts only to enlarge the analysis.
By using process writing approach, students could be more aware of their mistakes and what should be revised in their writing.Since in this study, the revision was done by the students, their classmates, and the teacher, at last, their written texts had fewer errors.It is also in line with the research done by Bayat (2014) which found that the use of process writing approach resulted in better writing achievement.The students' motivation in writing was also increased when they knew that their writing would be published on the wall magazine of the school.They tried to write better in another writing assignment.They became more careful and active in asking the teacher about grammar and vocabulary related to their writing.
Process approach was also beneficial for the teacher-researcher to teach the materials that had not been understood well by the students.The teacher could evaluate the teaching and had an opportunity to re-explain what needs to be explained to the students after the students finished their draft and before they published them.

CONCLUSION
The implementation of story maps showed positive effects on students' achievement in writing narrative texts.The story maps make students aware of the elements of narrative text; thus, their ideas were completely delivered and understandable, and their overall written texts were coherent.The finding that shows no different effect of the use of story maps on the achievement in writing of the students across learning styles implied that teachers have the freedom to use story maps in the teaching and learning process regardless of the learning styles of the students.This indicates that story maps are workable for students with different learning styles.
The use of process-writing approach also gave positive impacts on students' achievement in writing narrative texts.Students could have the revision several times by themselves, their friends, and the teacher.Students were also motivated when their writing products were published.They tried to write better and not to make any mistakes by actively asking the teacher about grammar and vocabulary.Therefore, the learning and writing process was carried out more meaningfully.Dealing with some limitations of the study, further research needs to be conducted to ensure more valid and reliable answers with regard to the effect in the use of story maps on students' achievement in writing other text types.Using the bigger number of subjects or better instruments are suggested for the further studies.

Table 1 .
The Procedure of the Treatment

Table 3 .
The Result of Normality Test

Table 4 .
The Result of the Homogeneity of Variances

Table 5 .
The Comparison of the Means of Pre-test in Experimental and Control Groups t-test for Equality of Means

Table 6 .
The Group Statistics Based on the Post-test

Table 8 .
The Result of Normality Test of Visual and Auditory Groups

Table 9 .
The Result of Homogeneity Test of Visual and Auditory Groups

Table 10 .
The Comparison of Means between Visual and Auditory Groups t-test for Equality of Means

Table 11 .
The Description about Visual and Auditory Learners

Table 12 .
Comparison of the Difference of Achievement in Writing between Visual and Auditory Learners in the Experimental Group