The Discovery Learning in Teaching Writing Skill in Junior High School

Descriptive writing is a one of genre taught in the year VII students of Junior High School based on Curriculum 2013. In writing descriptive, it is expected to the students are able to write a simple descriptive. Therefore through descriptive writing, the writer would like to minimize the students learning problem, to know the students achievements and their difficulties in learning writing. In 2013 English curriculum, there are four language skills that must be taught to Junior High School students, those are reading, listening, speaking, and writing. Oshima and Haque (1999:50) state that descriptive writing appeals to the senses, so it tells how something looks, feel, smells, tastes and sounds. Briefly, descriptive writing is used to make something clear and vivid, so that the readers can understand it. The teaching of English based on School Based Curriculum in Indonesia is delivered through text and context. Literary works are part of the text. They have been taught for all level of schools in Indonesia. Whether the subject is listening, speaking, reading, or writing, teachers of English should deliver it through text and context. Consequently, discovery learning refers to various instructional design models that engage students in learning through discovery. Discovery learning is a technique of inquiry-based learning and is considered a constructivist based approach to education. It is supported by the work of learning theorists and psychologists (Jerome Bruner, 1960). Commonly, seventh grade students of SMP Negeri 10 Palembang are afraid of making mistakes and worried about their ability in choosing and arranging words to produce sentences. Those feelings seem to make the students unconfident in a writing class. The Discovery learning technique tries to improve students’ writing skill and make the students more active in the class because it contains some activities that encourage the students to write up in the class.


Introduction
In the world, English is the most important language. Almost every country uses English as an important element in everyday activities. In this global area we should try to be able to speak English to communicate with people from other countries in the world so that we can keep up with the development of science, technology, and culture around the world. By mastering English, it is easier for us to make a relationship with other countries. English as an international language is used as a means of communication among people in trade, politics, and professional fields. In Indonesia, English is taught as the first foreign language optionally from the sixth year of elementary school (SD), and obligatory from the first year of junior high school (SMP) through the third year of senior high school (SMA) even for some semesters at university. Writing is the most important language skill to be developed in the classroom. Although the writing and the oral skill are combined in the classroom 2 and the one clearly benefits from the other, writing has certain characteristics which seem to make it difficult for pupils to get to group with, especially for younger pupils. It means that writing and other skills especially speaking skills benefit for each other but writing has certain characteristics. Its characteristics covered many things such as its stages, sentence construction, mechanics, diction, punctuation, paragraph coherence etc. Those characteristics seem to make it difficult for student to master. Seeing the difficulties of writing, it is understandable that students have a fear feeling and little enthusiasm in writing class. Commonly, they are afraid of making mistakes and worried about their ability in choosing and arranging words to produce sentences. Those feelings seem to make the students unconfident in a writing class. Having a little confidence can make them reluctant to try to write, even dislike writing. It is the duty of English teachers to create an exciting and conducive writing class as well as to give cautious guidance to the students. The teachers should try to find productive strategies in encouraging the writing class in order to encourage students to like writing. It was really a hard work, but students should be given a strong foundation for their writing skill before entering a higher level education.
Consequently, Discovery learning is a technique of inquiry-based learning and is considered a constructivist based approach to education. It is supported by the work of learning theorists and psychologists (Jerome Bruner, 1960). Discovery learning makes students independent to think something.They must experience anything by themselves and answer the question by what they get in experience phase. This method also can improve vocabulary and grammar because they will be learning with experiencing together. Since discovery learning plays an important role in English language teaching, this paper is intended to discuss the discovery learning technique to teach writing skill. There are many kinds of English text. In the seventh grade of school, one of the texts which is studied by students is descriptive text.
According to Bachtiar Bima and Cicik Kurniawan (2005), they stated that Descriptive text is a text, which says what a person or a thing is like. Its purpose is to describe and reveal a particular person, place, or thing. Descriptive text stretch out many information about certain people, things, and place clearly and detail.
And also the language features of descriptive text are  Focus on particular participantas  Using atrribute and identifying proccess  Frequent use of ephitets and classifier in nominal group  Using simple present tense Sometimes using figurative language = methapor or simile A. Literature Review Harmer (2004:86) defines, "writing is processes that what we write is often heavily influenced by the constraints of genres, than these elements have to be presented in learning activities". Holme (2004:160) states that writing is an ability to make form words that in general it may have a higher truth value than the fact that it has set it down. According to Heaton (1975:138), the writing skills are complex and difficult to teach, requiring mastery not only of grammatical and rhetorical devices but also conceptual and judgment elements. The following analysis 9 attempts to group the many and varied skills necessary for writing good prose into your main areas: a. Grammatical skills: the ability to write correct sentences. b. Stylistic skills: the ability to manipulate sentences and language effectively. c.

Generic Structure Function Identification
Description  It is a statement or a short paragraph that identifies the object that is going to be described.  It is usually interesting and able to provoke the readers to b be eager to red the text  It may consist of one of several paragraphs. This part is used to give sufficient description about the object as mentioned in the identification part.  The description of the object can be done according to different angles, such as size, length, strength, color, height, condition of the location, weather, qualities, shape, etc.
Mechanical skills: the ability to use correctly those conventions peculiar to the written language, e.g.: punctuation, spelling. d. Judgment skills: the ability to write in appropriate manner for a particular purpose with a particular audience in mind, together with an ability to select, organize, and order relevant information. Considering those statements above, the writer concluded that writing was a way to produce language that came from our thought. It was written on a paper on a computer. It was also a process that what we wrote was influenced by the constraints of genre and had to be presented in learning activities.
There are many kinds of English text. In the seventh grade of school, one of the texts which is studied by students is Descriptive text. According to Bachtiar Bima and Cicik Kurniawan (2005), they stated that Descriptive text is a text, which says what a person or a thing is like. Its purpose is to describe and reveal a particular person, place, or thing. Descriptive text stretch out many information about certain people, things, and place clearly and detail.
In 2013 English curriculum, there are four language skills that must be taught to junior high school students, those are reading, listening, speaking, and writing. Relating to this point, writing is the last skill that must be taught and sometimes it is only given small portion in teaching learning process. On the other hand, writing ability is much needed not only for copying English words, sentences or paragraph but also for expressing students' ideas in a short functional written text and simple essay. In addition, Brown (2001: 335) wrote that there are nine processes in writing approach i.e. (1) focus on the process of writing that leads to the final written product, (2) help student writers to understand their own composing process, (3) help them to build strategies for prewriting, drafting and rewriting, (4) give students time to write and rewrite, (5) place central importance on the process of revision, (6) let the students discover what they want to say as they write, (7) give students feedback throughout the composing process (not just on the final product) as they attempt to bring their work closer to the intention, (8) encourage from both the instructor and peers, and (9) include individual conferences between teacher and student during the process of composition Based on Harmer (2001: 113), the process of writing involves planning, drafting, reviewing and editing. In this approach, students are taught planning, drafting, revising, editing, and publishing strategies at each stage of the writing process to help them to write freely and arrive at a product of good quality. Discovery Learning is a method to understand the concepts, meanings, and relationships, through intuitive process to finally come to a conclusion ( Mendikbud, 2013 ) .
Discovery learning refers to various instructional design models that engage students in learning through discovery. According to Joo (1999: 285) discovery learning is a type of method where learners construct their own knowledge by experimenting with a domain, and inferring rules from the results of these experiments. The basic idea of this kind of method is that because learners can design their own experiments in the domain and infer the rules of the domain themselves they are actually constructing their knowledge. Because of these constructive activities, it is assumed they will understand the domain at a higher level than when the necessary information is just presented by a teacher or an expository learning environment.

Discussion
This paper is attempt to explain & solve the problem of How can discovery learning improve students' writing skill on descriptive text at VII grade in Junior High School of SMP Negeri 10 Palembang? There many attributes in discovery learning. But there 3 main attributes that must be there in discovery learning. (Bicknell-Holmes and Hoffman ; 2000) 1. Exploring and problem solving to create, integrate, and generalize knowledge. 2. Student driven, interest-based activities in which the student determines the sequence and frequency. 3. Activities to encourage integration of new knowledge into the learner's existing knowledge base. The first attribute of discovery learning is a very important one. Through exploring and problem solving, students take on an active role to create, integrate and generalize knowledge rather than engaging in passively accepting information through lecture or drill and practice.
A second attribute of discovery learning is that it encourages students to learn at their own pace, so students can get the learning proccess with enjoy situation A third major attribute of discovery learning is that it is based on the principle of using existing knowledge as a basis to build new knowledge. So students can build their existing knowledge by extending what they already know to invent new ideas.
According to Mendikbud (2013), there are several steps of Discovery Learning including: 1. Setting learning goals.
2. Identifing the characteristics of students (prior knowledge, interests, style learning, and so on) 3. Choosing the subject matter 4. Determining the topics that students need to learn inductively (from examples of generalization) . 5. Developing learning materials in the form of examples, illustrations, task, etc. To be learned by the students . 6. Setting the lesson topics from simple to complex, from concrete to the abstract, or from the stage enactif, iconic to the symbolic. 7. Conducting assessment process and student learning outcomes Besides steps that are mentioned above, Mendikbud (2013) also proposes some Application Procedure of Discovery Learning Method. According to Syah (2004: 244) in applying the Discovery Learning method in the classroom, there some procedures that should be implemented in the teaching and learning activities in general as follows : 1. Stimulation ( Stimulation / Giving Stimuli ) Stimulation at this stage serves to provide the conditions of learning interactions that can develop and assist students in exploring materials. In this case Bruner (1960) in Mendikbud (2013) provides stimulation by using questioning technique. Asking questions to the students can expose students to the internal conditions which encourage their exploration. Related to the teaching writing skill especially in Descrptive text, the teacher asks the students a question for example "Who is your favorite a singer?" or "Have you ever visit Parangtritis beach ?". By giving such kind of questions, it will stimulate the students mind to remember their experience.

Problem Statement (Statement/Identify the Problem)
The next step is giving an opportunity to the student to identify as many agendas as possible which are relevant to lesson material, then one of them is selected and formulated in the form of hypotheses (answers while the question of the problem) (Syah 2004: 244), while the problem chosen then will be formulated in the form of a question, or hypothesis, i.e. statement as a temporary answer to the questions proposed.
In teaching writing for this stage, the teacher gives the opportunity to the students select one the picture of idols or history objects that they may had. Each student should have one place or idol to be selected. Selecting the picture of idols or history objects is based on their real experience with them. Then, the teacher asks the students to remember and imagine that. The teacher also asks the students to make reason why they choose that picture. Finally the students write the problem statement, means their problem is describing those activities or places.

Data Collection
When the exploration is ongoing, the teachers also give the opportunity to the students to gather as much information as possible that is relevant to prove the hypothesis whether it is true or not (Syah, 2004: 244). At this stage, the answer of hypothesis questions will be looked for to prove the truth of the hypothesis itself. In this stage, the teacher asks students to write a list what are the object (idol/place) had. By looking up to the list, it will help the students to easily remember. The teacher asks the students to free write everything about the object. 4. Data Processing According to Syah (2004: 244) data processing is the activity of processing the data and information that has been obtained by the students either through interviews, observation, or others. All the information as a result of readings, interviews, observation , and so on then will be processed, randomized, classified, tabulated, even if it is calculated in a certain way and interpreted on a given confidence level (Djamarah, 2002: 22). Related to teaching writing, in this step the teacher asks the students to process their free writing to become a draft. Process here means classifying which sentence is able to be developed and which one is unable.

Verification (Proof)
At this stage the students perform a careful examination to prove whether true or not the hypothesis determined by finding the alternatives and associated with the outcome of data processing (Syah, 2004: 244). Verification intended to make the process of learning will run well and creatively if the teacher provides opportunities for students to find a concept, theory, rule or understanding through examples that the might be encountered in their life . In this phase, the role of the teacher is giving the materials and example about descriptive text to each of the student. Then, the teacher asks students to observe and study by themselves. By this step, the students have experience in discovering the concept, theory and rule by themselves. The teacher also lets the students to find out other information and other example about descriptive text from other sources. It can be from book or internet. By finding other information, it will help the students to strengthen their idea in developing their draft. 6. Generalization (Interesting Conclusions / Generalization) The generalization / draw the conclusion stage is that the process of drawing a conclusion which can be used as a general principle and applies to all events or the same problem, with regard to the result of verification (Syah, 2004: 244). Based on the results of the verification, it is formulated the principles underlying the generalization. After draw conclusions, the students should pay attention to the process of generalization that stressed to the importance of mastering the lesson over the meaning and rules or principles underlying the extensive experience of a person. this stage, the students draw the conclusion about Descriptive text and ready used their own finding to develop their draft into a text. The role of the teacher is by giving instruction to the students to write 2 paragraphs based their ideas about idol or place they already chosen. They should pay attention for the grammatical, content, vocabulary,organization, and mechanic of the writing a desriptive text

Conclusion
Discovery learning makes students independent to think something.They must experience anything by themselves and answer the question by what they get in experience phase. This technique also can improve vocabulary and grammar because they will be learning with experiencing together. By using the discovery learning technique in English language teaching, teacher can help students who have a fear feeling and little enthusiasm in writing class (many things such as its stages, sentence construction, mechanics, diction, punctuation, paragraph coherence etc. Those characteristics seem to make it difficult for student to master their writing. Commonly, seventh grade students of SMP Negeri 10 Palembang are afraid of making mistakes and worried about their ability in choosing and arranging words to produce sentences. Those feelings seem to make the students unconfident in a writing class. Having a little confidence can make them reluctant to try to write, even dislike writing. It is the duty of English teachers to create an exciting and conducive writing class as well as to give cautious guidance to the students. The teachers should try to find productive strategies in encouraging the writing class in order to encourage students to like writing. It was really a hard work, but students should be given a strong foundation for their writing skill before entering a higher level education. should not be afraid of making mistakes and worried about their ability in choosing and arranging words to produce sentences, because it would make them do not enjoy writing and lack of confidence in writing on their own. In making descriptive text, they should use stages in writing process like drafting, planning, editing, and publishing, so they could write freely and easily.