THE EFFECT OF COOPERATIVE INTEGRATED READING COMPOSITION (CIRC) ON STUDENTS’ WRITING CRITICAL ESSAY

Essay is the most essential part in writing critical essay. It is one of the subjects that learned by English students. CIRC is a method to improve students’ writing ability. Cooperative integrated reading composition (CIRC) was implemented on students’ writing skill through quasi experimental research; post-test only group design. Sample of the research was thirty nine students. Writing test was used to collect the data and analyzed by using independent t-test. The finding was students who were taught by cooperative integrated reading composition (CIRC) had better scores of writing critical essay than those who were taught by small group discussion. It meant that CIRC give an effect toward students to improve their writing skill.


I. INTRODUCTION
Writing critical essay is exploring ideas. It is arranging words; developing into sentences and paragraphs. It needs exercise and habit. Moreover, it requires appropriately grammar and words choice. Critical essay is subject learned by sixth semester students of English Study Program. This subject is given after they had been studying writing I, II, III, and IV. Critical essay is one of applications of writing subject. It needs critical thinking, logic and argumentative. The aim of this subject is students are able to identify essay organization and essay construction, write essay, give opinion toward essays, and write critical essay.
Nevertheless, students have problem in comprehending essay even writing critical essay. Based on the result of observation and teaching experience at English study program, it could be seen from their last mid semester. Twelve of thirty nine students (30.8%) were not able to find main idea. Eight of them (20.5%) used inappropriate words while writing the answer of questions related essay. Fifteen of them (38.4%) failed to identify essay construction. Others (10.2%) did not know about essay organization. Besides, writing critical essay needs comprehension on essay well and summarizes the essay. Moreover, students master grammar, paragraph structure, and paragraph development. In addition, they also have to take not of punctuation. It aimed so that students are able to write critical essay well. Essay is something written in presenting a topic. According to Shiach (2007:10), an essay is a piece of writing that methodically analyses and evaluates a topic or issue. Fundamentally, an essay is designed to get academic opinion on a particular matter. There are many kinds of essay. They are exposition, demonstration, fiction, non-fiction, politic, and so forth. Essay has construction and organization. Moreover, Shiach says that essay organization consists of the beginning, middle, and the end. The beginning is special because it states the thesis in the first sentence. The middle paragraphs contain the meat of essay. Here is where the thesis is exemplified, argued, demonstrated. Each middle paragraph comes from and is somehow related to the thesis. Each develop some central ideas (one per paragraph) that backs up demonstrates, exemplifies, or otherwise expands upon the thesis statement of essay. It is usually stated in a single sentence and often called topic sentence. The ending wraps things up, tie everything together, and create thereby a sense of completion. In the end of essay, summary is one possibility that brings to appoint and thus to impart the sense of ending. It is pulling ideas together and of reminding the reader of the main point made in essay.
Beside organization, essay also has construction. Every essay is constructed of various elements. To understand an essay fully, therefore, one must understand the elements of which is composed. Syafi'i (2004:25) says that essay construction consist of title, structural elements, means support, examples and other concretions, and theme or thesis. Writing critical essay is writing critique or evaluation or opinion on essay. Delfi (2011) says that critical essay is a composition about opinion or reader's response on someone's essay. He adds there are four components characteristics in critical essay. They are data, facts, conclusion, evaluations, and assessments. In addition, she states that critical essay is critical thinking, analysis, and evaluation on essay.
Writing critical essay must write systematically and include strengthen and weakness of essay. It must be objective and suitable with assessment principles. The length of critique depends on needs and depth of content. There are some steps before writing critical essay. Diensan (2011) says that writer should pay attention the theme that will be critique, find suitable references, identify elements pros and cons, and re-read and revision. There are four steps to write critical essay. Shiach (2007:15) states that structures of writing critical essay are introduction, summary, critique, and conclusion. In introduction part, the writer writes about identity of essay. Then, write summary of essay (important part of essay). Next, the writer critiques the essay based on elements of essay. It will determine and describe about strengthen or the weakness of essay. Last, writer write conclusion of critical essay. To help students comprehending essay, usually, teacher/lecturer apply small group discussion. According to Ur (2011:54), small group discussion is a group of three or five students in studying, practicing, or discussing a material or subject in order to meet educational objectives. It means students can freely question, share knowledge. Then, she adds that working in small group increase students' involvement in the discussion. Students are also likely to be more open with classmate than in large class discussion. Furthermore, Jhonson and Jhonson (2007:80) say that the major reason of small group discussion is to create the opportunities for the students to develop personally and socially. It means by doing a task in small group discussion, the students get a lot of chances in expressing their idea. However, teacher/lecturer can use cooperatives learning. One of them is Cooperative Integrated Reading and Composition (CIRC cooperation. It is designed to develop reading, writing, vocabulary, and spelling. Slavin (2005:12) states that students in CIRC are assigned to teams composed of pairs of students. They are working a series of cognitively engaging activity such as oral reading, contextual guessing, summarizing, retelling the text, writing composition based on the text, revising correcting composition, practicing spelling, decoding, and vocabulary. Slavin (2005:9) states that CIRC guides the teachers in motivating students to work in group in all levels of performance toward a group goal. Then, He adds that CIRC has three basic elements; textrelated activities, direct instruction in reading comprehension, and integrated language. According to Durukan (2010:6), CIRC gives effect on reading and writing skill. The learners work cooperatively in pairs to read for each other, summarize stories, write responses to literature, and practice their spelling, decoding, and vocabulary development skills. Likewise, they develop comprehension and writing skills through reading and process writing workshops. Based on explanation above, it can be conclude that CIRC is one kind of cooperative methods which can be applied in various activities. It is very effective in reading, writing, and language art. As the result, students motivated to finish their task in teaching learning process. CIRC is developing to integrated writing and reading lesson. Moreover, this technique motivates the students and improves' students' reading comprehension and writing/language arts.

II. METHODS
The type of this research is an experimental research. The design was the posttest-only group design. There was no pre-test given either on experimental or control class. This research was conducted on thirty nine students. There are 22 students at class A and 17 students at class B. Class A was experimental class and class B was control class. CIRC was applied in experimental class and small group discussion in control class. The instrument of this research is writing test. The questions were arranged based on essay structure (organization) and construction which are adopted from the experts' theories.

III. RESULTS AND DISCUSSION
All of the data were gathered from students' writing test. The test was given on post test in experimental class and experimental class. The data were gathered from thirty nine students. In addition, Sig (0.004) was smaller than α (0.05). Thus, null hypothesis (H0) was rejected and alternative hypothesis (Ha) was accepted. It means that Cooperative Integrated Reading Composition (CIRC) gave effect on students' writing critical essay. In conclusion, students who were taught by CIRC had better writing skill than those who were taught by small group discussion. The result of students' score in critical essay subject in experimental class was greater than the students' score in control class. It caused CIRC proven helped students in comprehending essay in order to they are easier write critical essay. The finding was in line with Slavin (2005:113), Zainuddin (2015: 12), andDurukan (2010:102-109). They say that cooperative integrated reading and composition give effect on reading and writing. CIRC can improve students in summarizing, retelling, questioning, clarifying and predicting. It means that students plan, revise, and edits their composition in close collaboration with their group mate in order to get good writing critical essay. Besides, CIRC guides the teachers in motivating students to work in group in all levels of performance toward a group goal. Students were motivated in comprehending essay in pair in order to all of essay types could be comprehended by students well. Moreover, learners work cooperatively in pairs to read for each other, summarize stories, write responses to literature, and practice their spelling, decoding, and vocabulary development skills. Furthermore, this result obtained because CIRC is developed to support traditionally used "skill-based reading groups" approach. Firstly, reading groups are established in the classroom. Next, students are paired off within the groups. When the lecturer works with a reading group, couples try to teach each other meaningful reading and writing skills by using reciprocal learning technique. They help each other in performing basic skill-building activities (such as oral reading, contextual guessing, asking questions, summarizing, writing a composition based on the story). Besides, students work in pairs within their teams, it will engage activities, including partner reading (reading to each other), making prediction, identification of characters, settings, problem solutions, summarization, vocabulary, reading comprehension exercises and story related writing. Thus, after they are comprehending essay, they can write critical essay well. It can be conclude that CIRC is one kind of cooperative methods which can be applied in various activities. It is very effective in reading, writing, and language art. As the result, students motivated to finish their task in teaching learning process. CIRC is developing to integrated writing and reading lesson. Moreover, CIRC can increase students' writing critical essay.

IV. CONCLUSION/RECOMENDATION
Based on the finding and discussion, the result of study shows that students of experimental class had greater critical essay scores than students of control class. It could be concluded that students who were taught by Cooperative Integrated Reading Composition (CIRC) have better writing critical essay than who were taught by small group discussion. The English Lecturers are suggested to apply Cooperative Integrated Reading Composition (CIRC) in teaching critical essay subject.

V. ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
We would like say thanks to Dikti which had support this research through Hibah PDP Dikti 2017.