THE EFFECTIVENESS OF JAVANESE LANGUAGE COMIC WRITING PROJECT ON THE WRITING SKILLS OF 7TH GRADERS OF JUNIOR HIGH SCHOOL

Abstract

Writing skills for Javanese pacelathon (dialogue) texts among junior high school students are often sub-optimal due to monotonous, conventional learning methods. Students struggle to align direct dialogue writing with the appropriate levels of unggah-ungguh basa (Javanese speech levels). This study aims to examine the effectiveness of the Project-Based Learning (PjBL) method through a Javanese comic-writing project in improving the pacelathon text writing skills of 7th-grade students at SMP Negeri 4 Karanganyar. This quasi-experimental quantitative study involved class VII B as the experimental group (32 students) and class VII A as the control group (32 students). The experimental group received the comic-writing project treatment, while the control group utilized conventional methods. Data were collected through a writing performance test using a 1–4 scaled rubric, and subsequently analyzed using the Independent Samples t-Test assisted by SPSS. The results showed that the posttest mean score of the experimental class reached 81.87, which was significantly higher than that of the control class at 76.71. The t-test yielded a significance value (Sig. 2-tailed) of 0.034 (0.034 < 0.05), thereby rejecting H₀. It is concluded that the Javanese comic-writing project is effective in improving students’ pacelathon text writing skills, triggering visual-linguistic creativity, and facilitating the internalization of unggah-ungguh basa.