Experiential Learning (El): An Effective Teaching Method To Construct Students’ Writing Skill Viewed From Self-Efficacy

Abstract

This study investigates the effects of Experiential Learning in teaching writing from the perspective of students’ self-efficacy by means of a comparative experiment concerning on the experimental group taught by Experiential Learning and the control group by using Direct Instruction. The sixty students of a senior high school in Central Java, Indonesia were chosen randomly and participated in this research. These participants are asked to compose a text in order to examine their writing skill after having eight-meeting treatments and fulfil the self-efficacy questionnaire. The results show that Experiential Learning guides the students to achieve significantly a greater writing skill than those using Direct Instruction and the high self-efficacious students perform better writing skill than those having low self-efficacy. Additionally, it was found that there is an interaction between those methods and students self-efficacy in writing skill. Therefore, Experiential Learning is suggested as an alternative teaching method in constructing students’ writing skill and self-efficacy.