The Collaborative Learning to Enhance Reflective Writing in English

Abstract

Writing is one of the skills in English needed to express someone’s view. However, some students have problem in elaborating their idea or view. As one of the media to communicate, writing is important to study. Unfortunately, writing as an essential skill that all higher education students must master to succeed in their degree and professionally is not an easy thing to learn. It takes practices and techniques. One of the applicable techniques is reflective writing which is also known as journal writing. There are several studies which examined the benefit of doing this, yet the result of this technique combined with another technique is needed to know. The researcher would like to know the result when collaborative learning is mixed with reflective writing. It has been known that collaborative learning inspires students to read, listen, write, and reflect on their work together. In this current study, the researcher wanted to find out (a) the ability of social factors to enhance the journal writing, (b) whether collaborative learning gives impact to student’s perfomance in reflective writing. Data have been gathered through questionnaires from vocational students. Likert scale was employed with scale ranging from 1 (strongly disagree) to 5 (strongly agree) to find out how social collaboration helps students do their reflective writing. The findings provide evidence that (1) social factors such as interaction with peers and lectures and social presence positively impact reflective writing, (2) in terms of reflective writing, most of participants focused more on using descriptive words. It has been concluded that overall, collaborative learning engaged well and enhanced the reflective writing. Therefore, their usage must be stimulated in studying English.