Abstrak
The purpose of this research is to determine the significant effect of Role, Audience, Format, Topic (RAFT) strategy on students' writing skills. The method used in this research was pre-experimental method. The sample for this research was the students of eight grade of SMP Negeri 5 Tarakan. The instruments used are writing test of pre-test and post-test. In addition, the researcher analyzed the data using the paired sample t-test with SPSS 26.0. From data analysis, the research results showed that the mean score for pre-test writing was 59.04 and the mean score post-test was 74.92. The results of Paired Sample T-test obtained a value of 0.000 which is smaller than 0.05, which meant that the alternative hypothesis (Ha) was accepted and the null hypothesis (Ho) was rejected. Therefore, it can be concluded that the Role, Audience, Format, Topic (RAFT) strategy had proven effective in improving the writing skills of eighth grade students at SMPN 5 Tarakan.