Outdoor Education: A Contextual English Learning Activity to Improve Writing Ability of Young Adolescents

摘要

This paper reports an implementation of Outdoor Education as a contextual learning activity to improve the writing ability of young adolescents. It aims at (1) investigating how Outdoor Education is implemented in teaching English to young adolescents to improve their writing ability; (2) identifying the challenges faced by the teacher during the implementation; (3) finding strategies to overcome the challenges. A Classroom Action Research was employed as a research design that took 2 (two) cycles and each of those was divided into four phases namely Planning, Acting, Observing, and Reflecting. Moreover, the data were collected through three instruments, namely observation, interview with the students, and document analysis in the form of students' descriptive writings. The result of the study reveals that Outdoor Education has successfully improved the students' ability in writing descriptive text since they understand the linguistic features, content, and context of the text. It is proved from comparing the results of Pre-writing and final writing found in the second cycle shows some improvements especially in their varied vocabularies, correct grammar and their better score (from an average score of 56.16 to 80.17). However, the teacher found some challenges to implement it since the young adolescent students seemed to spend the time inefficiently. To overcome this, the teacher gave clear briefings before doing this activity and asked them to look up their dictionary for some unfamiliar words, so that they could finish their descriptive writing.