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133 

 

 
ELT FORUM 6 (2) (2017) 

 

Journal of English Language Teaching 

 
http://journal.unnes.ac.id/sju/index.php/elt 

 
 

THE USE OF PHOTOGRAPHS ON INSTAGRAM IN 

TEACHING DESCRIPTIVE TEXT TO IMPROVE 

STUDENTS’ WRITING SKILL 

 

Mustika Purwandari  
 

English Department, Faculty of Languages and Arts, Universitas Negeri Semarang, Indonesia  

 

Article Info 
________________  
Article History: 

Received in October 

2017  
Approved in November 

2017 Published in 

December 2017 
________________  
Keywords: photograph, 
instagram, writing 
descriptive, experimental 
study. 
  
____________________ 

 
Abstract  
___________________________________________________________________ 
This research was an experimental study to find out whether there is any learning achievement of students 

who are taught writing descriptive text using photographs as media which is significantly different from 

those who are taught without photographs. The subjects of the study were the 8th year students of SMP 

Negeri 1 Ungaran. In order to achieve the objective, the researcher conducted an experimental research. 

There were two groups involved in this research, the experimental and the control group. The experimental 

group was taught using photographs in Instagram and the control group was taught without using 

photographs in Instagram. After both groups were given the treatment, the result of the study shows that 

the mean score of experimental group was 74.80 and the control group was 72.63. It means that the score 

of the experimental group was higher than the score of the control group. The t-test result showed that t-

value was 2.056 and t-table was 2.002, which means that the t-value is higher than the t-table. It proves 

that there is a significant different achievement between the groups which taught using photographs in 

Instagram and using conventional teaching. Based on the result of this study, it is concluded the 

application of photographs in Instagram can improve students’ writing skill in writing descriptive text. It 

was effective and recommended for the English teacher as one of references in teaching and learning 

process. 

  
 © 2017 Universitas Negeri Semarang 

  


 Correspondent Address: ISSN 2252-6706 
B3 Building FBS Unnes  

Sekaran, Gunungpati, Semarang, 50229  

E-mail: unnes_english@yahoo.com  



M. Purwandari / Journal of English Language Teaching 6 (2) (2017) 

134 

 

INTRODUCTION 

English in a language of globalization is used in almost all of countries in the world as a 

means of International communication. Because of its significance role, English has been included 

to Indonesian Educational System Curriculum. It is a compulsory subject in Elementary School, 

Junior High School, Senior High School, and at the University level. The English curriculum 

stipulates that English subject should include four skills, there are listening, speaking, reading, and 

writing. 

One of the skills in English subject is writing. Writing is one of the important skills which has 

to be mastered by the students of Junior High School in learning English. Writing has always taken 

part of the syllabus in teaching English, (Harmer 2004: 31). Writing is a combination of a process 

and product so it is assumed as the most difficult skill. The process is a stage in which the students 

are about to make a product (text) and when they start to write. The product is the text as a result of 

the process of writing. Before producing a text, students need a long process starting from planning 

until producing. It is important to master language components such as grammar, vocabulary, and 

etc. in the process of writing.  

In the reality, there are many problems in writing especially in writing descriptive text. The 

students face difficulty in figuring out the objects that will be described. Djuharie (2007: 24) 

explained “Descriptive text aims to describe someone or something specifically both visible things 

that can be seen and invisible things for example characteristics and attitudes.” However, there are 

many students write descriptive texts only the visible things, they forget to write the invisible things, 

one of them is characteristic of the objects even they are important to be described. Instead of it, the 

students either think or say that they cannot, or do not want to write. Their perceptions occur 

because they lack of confidence in making writing based on the processes and the theories that are 

exist. They also think that writing is boring and they have „nothing to say‟. The boring of the 

subjects will lead the students become lazy and ignore to have the important knowledge and 

experience around the world (Harmer 2007: 113). 

For overviewing the problems, the teachers have to be more creative. They should use some 

media, methods, and techniques in order to the effectiveness of teaching writing a descriptive text. In 

this study, the researcher conducts research in utilising photograph in instagram as  media. The 

research aimed to investigate whether there is positive significant difference achievement of writing 

descriptive text gained by experimental group taught using photograph in instagram and comparison 

group taught without using photograph in instagram at SMP Negeri 1 ungaran in the academic year 

of 2016/2017 or not. It was  hoped that the photograph in instagram could develop students' skill in 

writing descrptive texts. 

LITERATURE REVIEW 

Writing 

Boardman and Frydenberg (2001) say that writing is a continuous process of thinking and 

organizing, rethinking and reorganizing. So, writing can be said clearly as the representative of 

thoughts and ideas of someone in written way. The goal of all writing, as stated by Palmer et. al. 

(1994), is to construct meaning for ourselves and to communicate that meaning to others. It means 

to write we should generate the ideas then deliver to the reader.  

Descriptive Text 

Descriptive is one genre which must be learned by students of a junior high school. According 

to Anderson and Anderson (1997:48), “descriptive text is a text which says what a person or thing is 

like”. Descriptive text is like painting pictures with words. By reading a descriptive text, readers feel 

that they see the description just like they see pictures. Another definition of descriptive text comes 

from Broadman (2002:6), he states that descriptive text is kind of paragraph which is used to 



M. Purwandari / Journal of English Language Teaching 6 (2) (2017) 

135 

 

describe what something looks like. It means descriptive text can be formed into two types; they are 

speaking and writing description. Thus, descriptive text is a kind of genre which is used to describe a 

particular person, place, activity, idea or thing which is drawn in word form both speaking and 

writing. 

In line with Broadman, Oshima and Hogue (1997: 50) state that “descriptive writing appeals 

to the sense, so it tells how something looks, feels, smells, tastes, and/ or sounds”. In other words it 

can be said that descriptive text captures one experience of a person, place or thing into words by 

appealing to the five senses: sight, hearing, smell, taste and touch. 

Photograph 

Photograph is one of the visual aids that can be used in writing. It makes something clearer. It 

also can be used to create situation for writing classes more clearly. One kind is that it tells us a 

simple and obvious story. 

Sudjana and Rivai (2007:71) state that “photograph is a kind of flat opaque picture including 

picture and printed painting”. The photograph belongs to graphical media or two-dimensional 

media, which can also be transferred into a transparent picture by using an opaque projector. Minor 

as quoted by Hikmah (2007:6) states that photograph is a two-dimensional visual representation of 

person, place, and things. Photograph may not only be worth a thousand words but it may also be 

worth a thousand years and a thousand miles. A photograph is also simple in that it can be drawn, 

printed, or photographically processed and it can also be mounted for preservation for the use in 

future. 

Instagram 

Instagram is a mobile, desktop, and Internet-based photo-sharing application and service that 

allows users to share pictures and videos either publicly or privately. Instagram allows users to edit 

and upload photos and short videos through a mobile app. Users can add a caption to each of their 

posts and use hashtags and location-based geotags to index these posts and make them searchable by 

other users within the app. Each post by a user appears on their followers' Instagram feeds and can 

also be viewed by the public when tagged using hashtags or geotags. Users also have the option of 

making their profile private so that only their followers can view their posts. 

METHODOLOGY OF THE RESEARCH  

This study was conducted in SMP N 1 Ungaran with the eighth grade students in the 

academic year of 2016/2017 as the population. The entire number of the students in this grade is 240 

students in eight classes. The sample of the research were the VIII F and VIII H students of SMP N 

1 Ungaran in the academic year of 2016/2017.The total number of subjects involved in this research 

were 60 students. The VIII F was given a treatment by using photograph in Instagram as a medium 

and the VIII H was taught by conventional method. The classes were given same materials and 

assignments each other with different tools. There were four meeting for both classes consisted of 

pre-test, treatments, and post-test. First, conducting a pre-test with the same test to know normality 

and homogeneity scores of experimental group (class VIII H) and control group (class VIII F). 

Second, treating experimental group with photograph in instagram  and control group with 

conventional media (text book). Third, conducting a post-test for both groups with similar test to 

know the significant difference achievement between two groups.  

The design of the experiment can be described as follows: 

 

 

 

 



M. Purwandari / Journal of English Language Teaching 6 (2) (2017) 

136 

 

E 01 X 02 

C 03  04 

 

Where:  

E : Experimental group (EG)  

C : Control group (CG)  

01 : Pre-test for the experimental group 

02 : Posttest for the experimental group  

03 : Pre-test for the control group  

04 : Posttest for the control group  

X : Treatment with photographs in Instagram 

(Arikunto, 2006) 

The pre-test were aimed to measure students' basic writing ability. Moreover, students were 

asked to write a descriptive text in 10-15 sentences for 80 minutes. The post-test purpose was to 

measure students' improvement of descriptive text writing which method was similar with the pre 

test. The obtained data were analyzed to get the normality, homogenity, and T-test result. The use of 

Statistical Package for the Social Science (SPSS) application, Microsoft Excel, and manual were 

combined to compute the data. 

RESULT AND DISCUSSION 

Pre-test 

The pre-test was conducted on Saturday, March 4th, 2017 for both control group and 

experimental group. It was held in the first meeting. There were 30 students of experimental group 

and control group joined this test.  

 

Diagram 3.1 The Pre-Test Result of Experimental and Control Group 

From the pre-test result, the average scores of the students were analyzed. The average score 

of experimental group was 62.90, while the average score of control group was 60.23. Although the 

result of pre-test showed the difference between the score average of control and experimental 

groups, but it was not very significant. It means that the prior ability between experimental and 

control groups was relatively the same before the treatment was given. 

Homogeneity 

58.5

59

59.5

60

60.5

61

61.5

62

62.5

63

63.5

Control Group Experimental Group

The Pre-test Result of Experimental and Control 

Group 

Control Group

Experimental Group



M. Purwandari / Journal of English Language Teaching 6 (2) (2017) 

137 

 

If both classes are not homogenous, the treatment also cannot be conducted because both 

classes do not have same ability in narrative text achievement. The homogeneity of pre-test of both 

the experimental and the control groups was computed as follows:  

  
               

              
 

       (Sudjana, 2005) 

Which the statistics hypothesis and research hypothesis are: 

   :   
    

  (both of samples have the similar varians) 

   :   
    

  (both of samples have difference variance) 

The criteria H0 accepted if            

 
             with the real degree 5%, dknumerator = 

       and dkdenumerator =       . 

so it can be computed:  

  
  

 

  
 
 

  
      

      
 = 1.22 

Since Fvalue(1.22) < Ftable (1.860), it could be concluded that the population between the 

experimental and control group were homogenous. It means that the study could be continued 

because the two groups were homogenous. 

2. Normality of the Pre-test in Experimental and Control Group 

I could implement the treatment when the data of the study was normally distributed. 

Normality test was used to check whether both groups was proper to be tested. The normality test 

result of pre-test could be seen in the following table: 

Tests of Normality 

 Kolmogorov-Smirnova Shapiro-Wilk 

 Statistic Df Sig. Statistic Df Sig. 

Pretest_Experimental 

Control 

.099 

 

.097 

30 

 

30 

.200* 

 

.200* 

.969 

 

.959 

30 

 

30 

.514 

 

.293 

a. Lilliefors Significance Correction     

*. This is a lower bound of the true significance.    

Table 3.1 Normality Test Result of Experimental and Control Pre-test 

The data were stated in normal distribution if p-value (Sig.) was higher than 0.05. From the 

calculation of Kolmogorov-Smirnov, the p-value of control group (0.200) was higher than 0.05. It 

showed that the pretest data of control group was normally distributed. And the p-value of 

experimental group (0.200) was also higher than 0.05. It could be stated that the pretest data of 

experimental group was normally distributed. Moreover, from the calculation of Shapiro-Wilk the p-

value of control group also 0.293 was higher than 0.05. It showed that the pre-test data of control 

group was normally distributed. The p-value of experimental group was 0.514 also higher than 0.05. 

It could be concluded that the pre-test data of experimental group was also normally distributed. As 

a result, it could be concluded that the pre-test data of experimental group and control group was 

normally distributed, so that the experiment could be continued. 

Post-test 



M. Purwandari / Journal of English Language Teaching 6 (2) (2017) 

138 

 

The post-tests for VIII H as the experimental group was held on March 25th 2017 and VIII F 

as the control group was held on March 18th, 2017. There were 30 students in both experimental and 

control classes who did the post-test. The result of the post-test can be seen as the chart below. 

 

Diagram 3.2 The Post-Test Result of Experimental and Control Group 

From the post-test result, the average scores of the students were analyzed. The average score 

of experimental group was 74.80, while the average score of control group was 72.63. It can be 

concluded that the achievement of the experimental group who were taught using photographs in 

Instagram was higher than the control  group who were taught using the existing technique that used 

in that school. 

Normality of Control Group and Experimental Group 

To compute the normality of the Post Test, the researcher using Statistical Package for the 

Social Science (SPSS) method. Below was the table of the students‟ distribution score on the post 

test: 

Tests of Normality 

 Kolmogorov-Smirnova Shapiro-Wilk 

 Statistic df Sig. Statistic Df Sig. 

Posttest_Experimental 

Control 

.089 

.126 

30 

30 

.200* 

.200* 

.979 

.973 

30 

30 

.811 

.624 

a. Lilliefors Significance Correction     

*. This is a lower bound of the true significance.    

Table 3.2 The Normality of Control and Experimental Group 

The data were stated in normal distribution if p-value (Sig.) was higher than 0.05. From the 

calculation of Kolmogorov-Smirnov, the p-value both of experimental and control group (0.200) was 

higher than 0.05. In addition, the calculation of Shapiro-Wilk, the p-value of control group (0.624) 

was higher than 0.05. And the p-value of experimental group (0.811) was also higher than 0.05. As a 

result, I concluded that the post-test data of both groups were normally distributed, so the t-test 

could be counted. 

T-Test Statistical Analysis 

71.5

72

72.5

73

73.5

74

74.5

75

Control Group Experimental Group

The Post-test Result of Experimental and 

Control Group 

Control Group

Experimental Group



M. Purwandari / Journal of English Language Teaching 6 (2) (2017) 

139 

 

The researcher used the following formula to calculate the difference gain of the pretest and 

posttest of the experimental group: 

Where: 

∑  : the sum of the difference gain of the pretest and posttest of the experimental 

group. 

   :   the difference gain of the pretest and posttest of the experimental group. 

   :   the number of the experimental group students 

 

   
∑ 

  

 

 = 
   

  
 

 =  12.1 

 So, the difference gain of the pretest and posttest of experimental group was 12.1. And the 

researcher used the following formula to calculate the difference gain of the pretest and posttest of 

the control group: 

Where: 

∑  : the sum of the difference gain of the pretest and posttest of the control group. 

   :  the difference gain of the pretest and posttest of the control group. 

   :  the number of the control group students 

 

   
∑ 

  
 

=  
   

  
 = 12.4 

So, the difference gain of the pretest and posttest of control group was 12.4. 

Group Average of Pretest Average of Posttest 

The Difference 

between Pretest and 

Posttest 

Experimental 62.90 74.80 11.9 

Control 60.23 72.63 12.4 

The difference between 

experimental and 

control group 

2.67 2.17  

Table 3.3 The Result of Pre-test and Post-test Average Scores of Both Groups 

   
∑ 

  
 

   
∑ 

  
 



M. Purwandari / Journal of English Language Teaching 6 (2) (2017) 

140 

 

After finding the different gain of the pre-test and post-test, I calculated the t-test to know the 

significant difference between the post-test of the experimental and control groups. It was done by 

comparing the t-value and t-table. The t-value was found from the score differences between the 

post-test of experimental and control groups, while the t-table was found by consulting to the critical 

value on the table column. The result of t-test can be seen in the table as follow, 

Independent Samples Test 

   Score 

   Equal 

variances 

assumed 

Equal 

variances not 

assumed 

Levene's Test for 

Equality of Variances 

F .470  

Sig. .496  

t-test for Equality of 

Means 

t 2.056 2.056 

df 58 57.563 

Sig. (2-tailed) .044 .044 

Mean Difference 2.167 2.167 

Std. Error Difference 1.054 1.054 

95% Confidence 

Interval of the 

Difference 

Lower .058 .057 

Upper 
4.276 4.276 

Table 3.4 The T-Test Post-Test of Experimental and Control Group 

From the calculation above, the result showed that the t-value was 2.056. For = 5% and df = 

30 + 30 - 2 = 58, t(0.05)(58) = 2.002. The t-table was 2.018, so the t-value was higher than the t-

table. Based on the computation above, it showed that there was a significant difference on post test 

result between experimental and control groups because t-value exceeds ttable (2.056 > 2.002).  

The use of calculating T-test in Post-test was to prove that there were significant differences 

between the result in control and experimental group. In this part, if Sig. (-2 tailed) was lower than 

0.05 then there were significant differences between control and experimental group in achieving the 

result of post-test. From the result in tables of Post-test T-test was shown that Sig. (2-tailed) was 0.01 

and t-test was 2.056. If the result of t-test in post-test was positive, and sig. (2-tailed) was lower than 

0.05. It indicated that there were significant difference between control and experimental group in 

achieving the result of post-test. Null hypothesis (Ho) was rejected and alternative hypothesis Ha) 

was accepted because t-value was higher than t-table (t value > t table). In conclusion, teaching 

writing descriptive text by using photographs in instagram was more effective to improve students` 

speaking skill of the eighth grade students of SMP N 1 Ungaran in academic year of 2016/2017 than 

the existing technique that used in that school. 

CONCLUSIONS 

There was significant difference in the achievement in understanding in writing descriptive 

text for both experimental and control group. It can be seen from the final score of the each group. 

At the first, the average of pretest between the experimental and control groups were 62.90 and 

60.23. Then after the students got the treatments, the score for experimental group became 74.80 and 



M. Purwandari / Journal of English Language Teaching 6 (2) (2017) 

141 

 

72.63 for the control group. And another result can be seen from the t-test result. The t-test result 

showed that t-value was 2.056 and t-table for α = 5% was 2.002. It means that t-value is higher than 

the critical value. From the result, finally, the researcher concluded that there was a significant 

difference between experimental and control group. By applying photograph, the students were 

encouraged to be active and creative. It gave them more motivation during the learning process. 

Photograph in instagram helps the students in learning English independently, especially writing 

skill. Furthermore, most of the students said that they were interested using photograph in instagram 

during learning writing descriptive text. They stated that photograph in instagram was effective to 

help them to improve their writing skill. 

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Anderson, M. and K. Anderson. 1997. Text Type in English. South Yarra: Macmillan Education Australia pty 

lid. 

Arikunto, S. 2006. Prosedur Penelitian: Suatu Pendekatan Praktek. Jakarta: PT Rineka Cipta. 

Boardman, C. A., Frydenberg, J. 2001. Writing to Communicate: Paragraph and  Essays,  Second Edition. 

New York: Pearson Education. 

Djuharie ,Otong S. 2007. Genre. Bandung: CV. Yrama Widya. Page 24. 

Harmer, Jeremy. 2007. How to Teach English. England: Longman. 

Harmer, J. 2004. How to Teach Writing. Essex: Longman. 

Hikmah. 2007. Pictures as a Means of Teaching Writing to the Second Year Students of SMA N 1 Weleri 

Kabupaten Kendal in the Academic Year of 2006/2007. A Final Project: English Depatment of  

UNNES: Unpublished. 

Oshima, A, and Hogue, A.1997. Introduction to Academic Writing, Second Edition. New York: Addison 

Wesley Longman. 

Palmer, B.C. et. al. 1994. Developing Cultural Literacy Through the Writing Process. USA: Allyn and Bacon. 

Sudjana, Nana and Ahmad Rivai. 2007. Media Pengajaran. Bandung: Sinar Baru Algesindo. 


