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Vol. 1, No. 1, August 2018, pp. 38-48 
E-ISSN: 2621-6485  

  
 

Old but Gold: The Use of Picture Cues to Teach Writing  

(An Experimental Research) 

 
1
Soviyah, 

2
Yunia Purwaningtias 

English Education Department, Universitas Ahmad Dahlan 
1
soviyah@pbi.uad.ac.id, 2yuniatias@gmail.com 

 
Abstract 

Picture use in an educational setting fits the idiom: old but gold. They have been used in the 

classrooms of various levels across generations. They are long known and proved to have 

the ability to help motivate, demonstrate, and instruct the students during a learning 

process. However, still, there are plenty of studies done revealing how successfully pictures 

work in theclassrooms up today.This study is a sort of complement to the phenomenon as it 

focuses on researching the use of pictures in a classroom. Specifically it aims at finding out 

the effectiveness of the use of picture cues in teaching writing. The study belongs to an 

experimental research involving two groups of experiment and control. The eighth grade 

students of a private junior high school in Central Java Indonesia are chosen as the subject 

of the research during 2017/2018 academic year. Employing sample population technique, 

the study involves a total number of 56 students who are equally divided into 28 students as 

the experimental group and 28 students as the control group. The experimental group is 

taught using picture cues while the control group is taught without picture cues. Pre-test 

and post-test are used as techniques to collect the data. As for the data analysis technique, 

it’s done quantitatively applying both descriptive and inferential statistics. The result of the 

research shows that there is significant difference in the students’ writing ability between 

those taught using picture cues and those who are not. This can be seen from the difference 

in the mean score between them. The result of the pretest shows that at the beginning, both 

experimental and control groups have slightly different ability in writing with the mean 

scores 51.32 and 47.86 respectively. Meanwhile, the result of the posttest indicates an 

obvious difference between them in which the experimental group gains 65.75 as its mean 

score and the control group gets 59.14. Furthermore, the application of Independent t-test 

calculation results in the score of 0.000, which is lower than 0.05. This means that the use 

of picture cues is effective. Based on these results, it can be concluded that the use of 

picture cues is effective to teach writing to students. 

Key words: picture cues, writing, experimental research, recount text 

How to Cite: Soviyah.,Purwaningtias, Y.(2018). Old but Gold: The Use of Picture Cues to 

Teach Writing  

(An Experimental Research).English Language Teaching Educational Journal, 1(1), 38-48. 

 

INTRODUCTION 

In Indonesia, English serves its position as a foreign language and 

becomes a compulsory subject from secondary school to college level. In 

elementary school level, English is categorized into one of the extra-curricular 

subjects, and hence it is optional. In the secondary school level, the learning of 

English has a purpose that the students of secondary school are able to improve 

their mastery of the four language skills, i.e. listening, speaking, reading, and 

writing. Besides, the students are also hoped to have a good mastery on English 

mailto:soviyah@pbi.uad.ac.id


 

 

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Soviyah, Purwaningtias 
 

micro skills such as vocabulary, pronunciation, structure, and grammar.  

Specifically in junior high school level, the target of English learning is to 

make the students be competent speakers of English, in both spoken and written 

forms. In other words, it can be said that on completing their three year school 

schema, the students of junior high school are expected to be able to 

demonstrate competency in the four skills of English i.e. listening, speaking, 

reading, and writing. 

Among four skills of English, writing has been considered the most 

difficult skill to learn. This is because unlike the other three skills, writing is 

complicated and requires mastery not only of grammatical and rhetorical 

devices but also of conceptual and judgmental elements (Heaton, 1975). In 

addition to being complicated by nature, the process of writing is demanding as 

well. It is a skill demanding process (Tedrow, 2018). Interestingly, in the 

classroom context, the strong complaints about the complexity of writing are 

coming not only from the students, quite often teachers also voice complaints 

about how difficult to teach writing is by stating that the students just can’t 

write! (Tedrow,2018). This situation slowly but surely has caused either 

students or teachers have a distaste for writing. 

One of the causes of the catastrophe is because both teachers and students 

have not done enough of writing. On the one hand, the students’ writing works 

they’ve done has been scrutinized quite long even before they are ready for 

inspection. On the other hand, though, very little time and support or guidance 

is provided by the teachers because the teachers are busy with administrative 

stuff. Practically, much of the writing task is assigned, and then graded, with an 

eye to finding mistakes and shortcomings. With such a condition, after many 

mistakes they make along the writing process, students will equate writing with 

spelling and grammar business rather than finding a voice and space for self-

expression. However in fact, like sports, writing is a skill that requires hours of 

practice, guidance, and feedback for successful improvement. But like a sports 

game too, teachers often put the students in a repeated and similar classroom 

routine in which they give them directions (a writing formula to follow), a topic 

the students can’t choose (the writing assignment), and a sports game style 

writing situation (a grade for a writing course or a standardized writing test). 

Consequently, neither such a situation makes the students and the teachers feel 

that both of them are either good writing teachers or good writers. 

The portrayed description above is exactly what the English teacher 

explained during the interview, which marked the beginning of the research. 

The research started with an intensive preliminary interview with the English 

teacher and the students of the school in which the research was done. From the 

interview it was revealed that there were some problems faced by the students 

when it came to the writing class. To sum up, these problems covered the 

students’ motivation in writing which was quite low, the students’ interest in 

writing which was regarded inadequate, the students’ difficulty in expressing 

their ideas,  the presence of  writer’s block phenomenon,  the monotonous 

learning activities, and  the dependency on one single English textbook. 

Furthermore, it was also found out that the teacher rarely used media during her 



 

 

 

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teaching. The activities of writing class were mainly based on the textbook. All 

these problems were assumed to have caused the students to get bored easily 

during the lesson and show constant laziness to do the homework. As a result, 

the students could not show competence in writing yet. This could be seen from 

the students’ writing works which displayed some writing drawbacks such as 

many grammatical errors, limited vocabulary use, and lack of coherence and 

unity. With these existing problems, the writing class surely needs help and 

calls for immediate solution. 

One of the ways to solve the problems is by utilizing learning media, 

especially the media that best fits the situation explained previously. And it’s 

picture cues. Why picture cues? There are some reasons for this. Firstly, picture 

cues are interesting as they contain various images. Moreover as these images 

are presented in series, they are able to encourage and stimulate the students in 

composing a text. Secondly, picture cues make creative students. As picture 

cues have a realistic format that helps the students to think and get more ideas 

in writing, they will definitely make students to be creative writers. 

Furthermore, pictures cues can stimulate language learning process because the 

pictures they provide usually contain cultural information. In addition, just a 

cherry at the top of the cake, picture cues are easy to make and inexpensive, it’s 

only needed pictures from any available sources such as used magazines, 

newspaper, and internet. These reasons are the center onto which the topic of 

this study is headed i.e. to have a trial on the use of picture cues in teaching 

writing and finding out its effectiveness. 

 

PICTURE CUES 

Literally, Picture cues is a word which is made up of two sequential words 

combined together i.e. picture and cue. The word picture is defined as a visual 

representation of something, such as a person or scene, produced on a surface, 

as in a photograph, painting, etc (Collins, 2005). In a similar but simpler way, 

Oxford dictionary (2015) gave definition of picture as a painting or drawing, 

etc that shows a scene, a person, or a thing. Meanwhile, cue is referred to an 

action or event that is a signal for somebody to do something (Oxford, 2015). 

More specifically, Collins (2005) specified cue as the part, function, or action 

assigned to or expected of a person. Combining these given meanings, picture 

cues can be defined as visual representation of something (a person, a scene, or 

a thing) produced on a surface which contain signals for somebody to do 

something. More briefly, picture cues can be referred to a number of pictures 

that contain sequences of signals or events which are related each other.  

In the language learning field, the role of pictures is noticeably significant. 

Pictures are usually used as learning media function to support and give help to 

the process of teaching and learning. It’s because pictures can not only motivate 

but also demonstrate and instruct the students during a learning process 

(Wright, 1989). By nature, as pictures are interesting to see, they are able to 

attract students so the students are more motivated to learn further. In addition, 

pictures are stimulating as well, as they can provide cultural information 



 

 

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through images. In sum, pictures have characteristics which can stimulate the 

language learning process, and thus they are beneficial to use.   

 

Taking a focused scope on the process of learning writing, the roles pictures 

and picture cues play are generally the same. In details, the functions of 

pictures cues are listed below:  

 1. Motivate students in learning writing. Pictures cues can increase students’    

motivation because it can make the situation of the classroom more 

interesting. 

 2. Inform students about the object. Picture cues can provide information 

including objects, actions, events, and relationships.  

 3. Train students to arrange the plot story. Picture cues can help students to 

arrange the story plot because picture cues provide sequences of events 

which interconnected one another. This way, the students will be able to 

arrange the story plot more easily. 

4. Facilitate students to expand the story. Since picture cues usually show 

objects, actions and even relationship, they can provide cue answer 

substitutions and sentence completions. Under this function, students will be 

able to start their written composition more easily and quickly. 

Typically, there are three kinds of picture cues (Brown, 2004), they are:  

1. Short sentence; containing a drawing of some simple actions, and the test-

takers are to write brief sentences. 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

  

 

 

 

2. Picture description; describing something based on the picture. Test-takers 

are asked to describe the picture using four of the following prepositions: on, 

over, under, next to, around. As long as the prepositions are used 

appropriately, the criterion is considered to be met. 

3. Picture sequence description; describing story line picture that can provide 

stimulation to the students and it must be ambiguous picture, because an 

 

Test-takers see the following picture  

1.            2.  

 

Test-takers read:  

1. What is the man doing in 1st picture? 

2. What is the man doing in 2nd picture?  

Test-takers write: 

1. He is eating, he is eating his lunch, he is holding the spoon etc. 

 

 

 



 

 

 

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open-ended task at the selective level would give test-takers too many 

options. 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 
Completing the functions of picture cues listed previously, Harmer (1998) 

stated that picture cues have some specific characteristic which cover the 

followings:  

1. Drilling: with lower level students, picture cues help teacher drill or give 

exercises to the students how to do cueing different sentences and 

practising vocabulary in the simple sentences. 

2. Communication: picture cues are extremely useful for a variety of 

activities such as describing and drawing activities that have related 

pictures. 

3. Understanding: one of the most appropriate uses of picture cues is for 

presenting and checking meanings. The pictures should be related and easy 

to guess. 

4. Ornamentation: picture cues have clear extra visual dimension. 

5. Prediction: picture cues are useful for getting students into what is coming 

next. Thus students will look at the pictures and guess what is shown. 

Test-takers see 
 

 
 

 

Test-takers read:  describe the man’s morning routine in six sentences 

Test-takers write:  

He gets up at five o’clock 

He takes a shower at 05.30 

At 06.40 he gets dressed 

Than he eats breakfast 

About 06.30 he leaves the house 

Then he plays football in the afternoon. 

 

 

 

 



 

 

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6. Discussion: picture cues can stimulate questions such as “What is 

showing?” 

 

In using the picture cues, there some suggested procedures. Prior to the 

use of picture cues in the classroom, the teacher should decide the theme/topic 

first. To do this step, it’s best to refer to the course syllabus. Next, the teacher 

provides the picture cues. For this stage, the teacher can make the pictures 

herself, search the internet, or take the pictures from used magazines or 

newspaper. In the classroom, these are the suggested procedures of using 

picture cues: 

1. The teacher arranges the pictures based on the theme/topic learned. 

2. The teacher divides the class into five or six groups, depending on the size 

of the class. 

3. The teacher distributes one set of the picture cues to each group. 

4. The teacher asks the students to pay attention to every object shown in the 

picture, then write it one by one chronologically according to the order of 

occurrence. 

5. On finishing the writing, the students are asked to submit the work to the 

teacher.  

 

RESEARCH METHOD 

With the aim of finding out the effectiveness of using picture cues to 

teach writing, this study was categorized into an experimental research. The 

research was conducted in a private junior high school in Banjarnegara district, 

Central Java province.  The research was done in May 2018 and involved56 

students of grade eight. These students were divided into groups of experiment 

and control consisting of 28 students each. There was no sampling technique 

used as the population served as the sample as well.  

As for the research variables, there were two variables used, i.e. 

independent variable and dependent variable. In this case, using picture cues to 

teach writing was the independent variable (X) and students’writing ability was 

the dependent variable (Y).  

A writing test in which the students were asked to write a text was 

utilized as the technique to collect the research data. Meanwhile, for the data 

analysis, it was done quantitatively by applying the descriptive and inferential 

anlysis, while t-test was used as the hypothesis testing method. 

 

Research Procedures 

As previously stated, this study was an experimental research and 

involved two research groupsnamely experimental and control groups. The two 

groups were given the same material, which was recount text, but different 

treatment. The experimental group was taught by using picture cues and the 

control group was taught without using picture cues.  

The picture cues were used as the learning media. For the picture cues, they 

were made of some series of pictures which were interrelated and having the 

common thread among them. The theme of the picture cues was centered 



 

 

 

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around Holiday. These picture cues were given in meeting 3, 4, and 5 

consecutively. 

The researcher acted as the teacher. She did the teaching by complying 

with the lesson plan prepared beforehand. The general teaching procedures 

were: the researcher explained the material and after that the students of the 

experimental group were given the picture cues and asked to write a text based 

on them. On finishing the text, the students submitted their writing works to the 

researcher. Then, the researcher assessed and gave feedback. Table 1 depicts 

the detailed schedule of the treatment. 

As for the writing test, both groups were given the same pre-test and 

post-test in which they were asked to write a recount text on their own. To 

assess the test results, it was used a writing rubric. As the final step, the results 

of both pre-test and post-test were compared to each other to find out whether 

or not there was significant difference between them. 

Table 1. Schedule of the Treatment 

Meeting  Day Topic 

1st Saturday 5th,  

May 2018 

Recount text (function, generic 

structure, language use) 

 

2nd Monday 7th,  

May 2018 

 

Holiday; Past tense  

3rd Tuesday 8th,  

May 2018 

Writing sentences based on the given 

picture cues 

 

4th Wednesday 9th, 

May 2018 

Writing recount paragraph based on 

the given picture cues 

 

5th Friday  11th, 

May 2018 

Writing recount paragraph based on 

the given picture cues 

 

RESULTS AND DISCUSSION 

Based on the findings and anlysis, it could be concluded that in terms of 

the writing ability, there was significant differencebetween the experimental 

group and the control group. It means that there was a difference between the 

students who were taught using picture cues and without using picture cues. 

Table 2 below shows the difference between them. 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 



 

 

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Table 2. Descriptive Analysis of Pre-test and Post-test  

of the Experimental and Control Group 
Class Category Frequency 

  Minimum Maximum Mean St.  

     Deviation  

Experiment Pre-test 28 76 51.32 13.894 

 Post-test  35 89 65.75 15.558 

Control Pre-test  34 71 47.86 11.323 

 Post-test 40 78 59.14 12.474 

                                                                            (Source: Data Analysis SPSS 16) 

From table 2 of the descriptive analysis of both pre-test and post-test 

between the experimental and control groups above, it’s obvious that there is a 

difference between the two groups. The difference lays on the aspects of 

minimum and maximum score, mean, and standard deviation.  Seen from these 

three aspects, it can be said that the experimental group outnumbers the control 

group. The first aspect is of the minimum and maximum score. In terms of the 

minimum and maximum score, the experimental group shows an increase from 

28 and 76 in the pre-test  to 35 and 89 in the post-test. Meanwhile, the control 

group improves lesser from 34 and 71 in the pre-test to 40 and 78 in the post-

test. As for the mean score, the experimental group shows better  improvement 

than that of the control group in which it increases from 51.32 in the pre-test to 

65.75 in the post-test, while the control group scores 47.86 in the pre-test to 

59.14 in the post-test. Regarding the standard deviation score, again, the 

experimental group exceeds the control group with 1.664 points (from 13.894 

in the pre-test to 15.558) while the control group only gains 1.151 (11.323 in 

the pre-test to 12.474 in the post-test).  

In addition to the descriptive analysis, it’s also done the inferential 

analysis. This analysis is done in order to check whether or not the distribution 

of the data is normal. In this study, Kolmogorov-Smirnov formula completed 

with SPSS 16 is utilized as the method to test the data normality. The complete 

result of the normality test is displayed through table 3 below. 

Table 3. Normality Test of  the Pre-test and Post-test of the Experimental and 

Control groups 

Class Category  Kolmogorov Smirnov Decision 

  Statistic Sig.  

Experiment Pre-test 0.144 0.200 Normal 

 Post-test 0.118 0.200  

Control Pre-test 0.113 0.200 Normal  

 Post-test 0.109 0.200  

                                                                      (Source: Data Anaysis SPSS16) 

 



 

 

 

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Based on the data on table 3, it can be concluded that both research data 

of the experimental and control groups are normally distributed. It’s because 

seen from the level of significance 0.05, both groups show the same result, 

which is higher than 0.05. The experimental group reaches the data probability 

(sig.) of 0.200 in both of its pre-test and post-test, which means that the data 

distribution of the experimental group is normal. The control group shows the 

same results as well. It gains 0.200 as its data probability (sig.) in both pre-test 

and post-test run. 

Besides the test of normality, another inferential analysis done is 

homogeneity test. Homogeneity test is done in order to know whether or not the 

score of one group has the homogeneous variance with the score of the other 

group’s. In other words, homogeneity test functions to analyze whether the 

population score is homogenous or not. In this study, the researcher used SPSS 

16.  In this case, the data is said homogeneous if the probability (sig.) is higher 

than the obtained probability, which is 0.05. In contrast, if the probability (sig.) 

score is lower than the probability score obtained (0.05), the data will be 

considered not homogeneous. The results of the homogeneity test of this study 

is illustrated through the following table: 

Table 4.Test of Homogeneity 

 

 

 

 

 

From table 4 it can be seen that, based on the gained mean score, the 

significant score (sig) of the data is 0.164, which is higher than 0.05. 

Therefore, it can be concluded that the data variance of the post-test of both 

experimental and control groups is homogeneous.  

The last analysis done is hypothesis testing. As previously stated, for 

hypothesis testing, the research used t-test. The t-test aims at finding out 

whether or not there is a significant difference in the mean score between the 

experimental group and the control group. Furthermore, hypothesis testing is 

also used to find out whether the use of picture cues is effective or not to 

teach writing to students of grade eight of junior high school. Theoretically, 

the hypothesis is rejected if the probability (sig.) is higher than 0.05, which 

means there is no significant difference between the experimental and 

control groups. On the contrary,   the hypothesis is accepted if probability 

(sig.) is lower than 0.05, which means there is a significant difference in 

both groups. The result of hypothesis testing is presented through table 5.  

 

Table 5. Independent Sample t-Test 

Class N Df Sig. (2.tailed) Decision 

Experiment 28 54 0.000 Have a  

Control 28   Difference 

                                                                      (Source: Data analysis SPSS 16) 

Class Levene Statistic Decision 

 Statistic Sig.  

Experiment 1.198 1.164 Homogeneous 

Control     



 

 

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Table 5 shows the result of t-test computation of both experimental 

and control groups, particularly the result of independent t-test of bothgroups 

in the post-test. From the table it’s clear that the final result is 0.000, which 

is below 0.05. It means that the proposed hypothesis is accepted and the null 

hypothesis is rejected. Therefore, it can beconcluded that the use of picture 

cues is effective to teach writing becausethere’s significant difference in 

writing ability between the students who are taught using picture cues and 

those taught without picture cues.  

Regarding the findings this research shows, it highlights the theory 

stating that picture cues as media can be stimulus for students during the 

learning process (Wright, 1989)). Furthermore the research findings also 

support the notion that when used as learning media, pictures (including 

picture cues) can best serve as an aid to motivate, demonstrate, and instruct 

the students during the learning process. It also helps students to be able to 

understand the material more easily because it presents realistic format that 

helps students to think and get more ideas in composing a text. In other 

words, picture cues is just an effective tool to support the students’ learning 

to write in English. 

In the research field, there are some supporters to the findings of this 

study. Among the researches of the same topic, some of the researches which 

show similar results, that picture (and picture cues) is an effective tool to use 

in learning writing, are such researches done by Wijayanti (2012),  Noor 

(2014), and Rizkiani (2016) who have researched the effectiveness of 

pictures and picture series in teaching writing. The researches of these three 

resulted in the conclusion that pictures is effective to use in learning writing. 

Furthermore, there’s an interesting fact in regards to the effectiveness 

of pictures use in the classroom. It’s that surprisingly pictures are serving as 

a great help in a reading class as well. This is what Maulina (2015) proved 

through her research on the use of pictures in learning reading 

amongstudents of junior high school. Maulina’s research concluded that 

pictures are effective to improve the students’ reading ability.  

 

CONCLUSION 

In conclusion, picture cues is an effective media to use in teaching 

writing, particularly in writing recount text. It’s shown through the outcome 

this research gains which shows that after being given treatment of picture cues, 

the students show better improvement than that of those who aren’t given 

picture cues. This fact once again proves that pictures and or picture cues is 

effective. And there’s no doubt about it. However, there’s another side of the 

research fields which is interesting to dig more. It’s the issue whether 

picturecues is also effective to use in teaching other language skills or whether 

it’s alsoeffective to use among students of higher or lower than junior high 

school level.This is such an intriguing issue worth further researches. 

 

 

 



 

 

 

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Collins. 2005. Collins English Dictionary. Complete and Unabridged.New 

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Harmer, J. 1998.How to Teach English. Kuala Lumpur: Longman. 

 

Heaton, J. B. 1975. Writing English Language Tests. Kuala Lumpur: Longman. 

 

Maulina, U. 2015. Using Picture Storybook to Improve Students’ Reading 

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