Identification of the Field Problems

ET : Kalau untuk mengajarkan materi sulit seperti narrative text susah juga. Vocabulary masih rendah. Kita tidak diberikan waktu yang cukup untuk grammar. Kalau kita fokus untuk ngajar grammar nanti fokusnya hanya disitu. Siswa juga hanya mengartikan kata per kata dari bahasa Indonesia ke bahasa Inggris. To teach complex material such as narrative text is difficult. The students’ vocabulary is poor. We do not have sufficient time to teach grammar. If I only focused on teaching grammar, we will stick in there. The students only translate words from Indonesian to English as well. R :Apakah bapak pernah pake stratgey PWIM? Have you taught students using PWIM technique? ET : Belum pernah. Ya memang perlu usaha untuk meningkatkan writing ability siswa. No, I have not. We do need effort to improve the students’ writing ability. Int-1 12 May 2015 The researcher also interviewed some students to get more information. The interviews were conducted on 12 May 2015. From the interviews, the students confirmed that they faced some difficulties in writing. They got limited time to brainstorm their ideas. They stated that they could not organize their idea in well sequenced. Related with grammar, they realized that their grammar mastery was low. They said that they had problems related with the word class and the use of simple past tense, especially irregular verb. According to them, the writing activity is not interesting because they just directly did the assignment and presented it in front of the class. This statement can be seen in the following interview transcript. R : Menurut kamu diantara empat skill bahasa Inggris. Paling susah yang mana?antara reading writing speaking listening? In your opinion, what is the most difficult skill in English? Is it reading, writing, speaking or listening? S : Tergantung konteksnya. Perintahnya apa. Tapi writing juga susah sih. It depends on the context and the instruction, but writing is difficult indeed. R : Kalo biasanya kalian disuruh menulis, kegiatan yang dilakukan apa? What are activities that you usually do in writing practice? S : Langsung disuruh kasih tugas, dikerjain, dipresentasikan, harus dipahami dan dihapalkan tanpa teks. We go directly to do some assignments. We did it and we presented it. We have to understand and memorize it. R : Apa kamu dikasih waktu buat brainstorming? Menulis hal-hal yang inti untuk dikembangkan jadi paragraf? Do you have time to brainstorm which is to write important things to be developed in the paragraph? S : Ngga ada. No, we do not have time to do it. R : Ketika proses menulis kamu kesusahan di bagian apa? When you try to write something, what is the difficult part in the process? S : Bingung kalimatnya harus ditaruh di bagian mana dulu. Inti paragrafnya ditaruh mana juga bingung. Kalo writing, kerangka kurang tepat. Seringnya inti bagian di depan. Yang harusnya jadi perkenalan malah di akhir. I hesitate to arrange the sentences correctly as well as where I should put the main paragraph. I often misplace the structure of the text that I write. Sometimes I put the main paragraph in the beginning of the text and put the introduction in the end of text. R : Selain itu kesalahan apalagi yang sering kamu lakukan ketika menulis?Misalnya grammar, apakah kamu sudah bisa? What other mistakes that you usually made in writing practice? Can you use grammar correctly? S :Sering salah yang past tense. Terutama yang irregular verb. I often made mistakes in using past tense, especially in using irregular verb. R : Sudah bisa membedakan antara noun adjective verb? Can you distinguish noun, adjective, and verb? S : Membedakan bisa, tapi menyusunnya kebalik-balik. Yes I can, but sometimes I made mistakes when I am trying to arrange it. R : Kalo nulis kalimat udah bisa belum? Can you write sentences? S :Nyusun kalimat udah bisa tapi masih suka kebalik-balik juga. I can arrange sentences even though sometimes it is not well arranged. R :Pernah ngga pak guru ngajar pake gambar pas ngajar writing? Has the teacher taught writing using pictures? S : Belum pernah. No, He has not. Int-3 12 May 2015 Furthermore, a pre-test was conducted on 13 May 2015. The test was done in order to get information about the students’ writing ability. At the pre-test, the researcher asked the students to write a folktale or any kinds of narrative texts. When they did the pretest, they needed a lot of time to generate the ideas. In the 10 minutes beginning, many students have not written any single word. They said that they did not have ideas to write. The researcher has provided the generic structure of narrative text in pre-test answer sheet to make the students easier to develop the story, but some of them still did not write the complication part and resolution. The following is the example of student’s writing before the action. From the figure above, it can be seen that the student’s ability in writing narrative text was very low. There were some students who made these kinds of grammatical problems. They obeyed grammatical rules such as subject-verb agreement. They did not understand how to use simple past tense in writing a narrative text. They also failed to use the right form of pronouns. Their vocabulary Figure 6. An Example of a Students Writing before Action mastery was very limited so that their sentences were meaningless. Furthermore, they obeyed to use the right punctuation and capital letter. In conclusion, the researcher analyzed that many students had difficulties in generating ideas, looking at the appropriate verb, composing the ideas into good paragraph and also using the correct grammar and mechanics. The following table shows the scores of students’ writing in pre-test. The scores of their writing were rated by the researcher and the collaborator. They assessed the students’ pretest by using scoring rubric adapted from Jacob et al in Weigle 2002. Table 3 The Students Writing Score Percentage in Pretest Score Categorization Frequency Interpretation Total Percentage 87.5-100 Excellent Good 6 18.75 75-87.4 Very good 1 62.5- 74.9 Good 5 50-62.4 Fair 9 Poor 26 81,25 37.5- 49.9 Poor 12 25-37.4 Very poor 5 Table 3 shows that the students’ writing ability was low. The scoring aspects include content, language use, vocabulary, organization, and mechanics. The result is that around 18.75 of the students belong to good category. The rest of the class or about 81.25 got bad scores. Therefore, it could be concluded that the students of VIII D class at SMP N 3 Mlati had some problems in writing narrative text related to content, language use, vocabulary, organization, and mechanics. Furthermore, the following table outlines the problems in English teaching and learning process that were identified through the class observation, interviews with English teacher and the students, and the pre-test result. Table 4. The Field Problems in the English Teaching and Learning Process of VIII D in SMP N 3 Mlati No. Problems Code 1. Most of students had difficulty in generating ideas. S 2. The students had limited vocabulary mastery. S 3. The students’ writing was less organized. S 4. Most of students translated the word from Indonesian into English language without considering the context. S 5. The students had difficulties in using the correct grammar in writing. S 6. The students did not pay much attention to the use of correct mechanics in writing. S 7. The students gave little attention to the teacher’s explanation and talk to their friends during the lesson. S 8. The students got limited time to practice writing. S 9. The students had low motivation in writing. S 10. The teacher did not give enough activities for students to practice writing. A 11. The mistake and the errors in writing that the students made were not discussed. A 12. The teacher did not vary the activities so that the students felt bored. A 13. Writing technique in the teaching and learning process was not implemented to help the students to write step by step using writing process. Tec 14. Interesting media rarely were given to the students in the teaching and learning process of writing. M S: student Tec: technique M: media A: Activity

2. Selecting the Problems

Based on the observation, interview, and pre-test conducted in the classroom, the researcher found out that the writing ability of grade VIII D students were still poor. Considering the time and feasibility of the problems to be solved, it was hard to overcome all problems found in the classroom. Therefore, the researcher selected some feasible and urgent problems to be solved. The following table shows the selected problems that were found in the field and indicators. Table 5. The Selected Problems and the Indicators No Categories Problems Indicators 1. Related to the students’ writing skill. a. Content The students had difficulty in generating ideas. - Most of students were confused in what they had to write. - Their writing had less supporting idea. - Most of students needed a lot of time to develop their idea. b. Organization The students’ writing was less organized. - The students had difficulties in arranging words into a correct sentence. - The students had difficulties in arranging the paragraphs. c. Vocabulary The students had limited vocabulary mastery. - The students often asked teacher to translate words. - Most of the students made many errors and mistakes in choosing appropriate vocabularies. d. Grammar The students had difficulties in using the correct grammar in writing. - Students made many errors and mistakes in agreement, tense, word order, articles, pronouns, and preposition. e. Mechanics The students did not - Most of the students made many errors and pay much attention to the use of correct mechanics in writing. mistakes in spelling, punctuation, and capitalization. Related to the teaching technique. - Writing technique in the teaching and learning process was not implemented to help the students to write step by step using writing process. - There were rarely introduction of new vocabularies to the students. - There was no drilling on how to write correct sentence to the student. - The focus was not on writing product of the students. In addition, the focus was on how the students presented orally their written product in front of the class. Related to the media The teacher provided limited varieties of media. - The teacher only used book or LKS for teaching the students. - The teacher rarely made use the teaching media in the classroom. Related to the students’ motivation The students had low motivation in writing. - The students were reluctant to do writing tasks. - Some students said they did not like writing. - The students considered that writing in English was difficult.

3. Determining the Actions to Overcome the Selected Problems

After selecting problems to be solved, the researcher decided to do some actions to overcome those problems. The proposed actions are presented in the following table. Table 6. The Actions to Overcome the Problems No. Problems Indicators Actions 1 Writing technique in the teaching and learning process was not implemented to help the students to write step by step using writing process. - There were rarely introduction of new vocabularies to the students. - There was no drilling on how to write correct sentence to the student. - The focus of the learning process was not on writing product of the students. In addition, the focus was on how the students presented orally their written product in front of the class. - Implementing PWIM technique which consists of six steps for teaching and learning process of writing. The steps are: 1. selecting pictures 2. identifying and labeling pictures 3. reading and reviewing the picture word chart 4. creating a title 5. generating words into sentences and paragraphs 6. reading and reviewing the sentences and paragraphs. 2 The teacher provided limited varieties of media. - The teacher only used book or LKS for teaching the students. - The teacher rarely made use the teaching media in the classroom. - Implementing the first step of PWIM technique selecting the pictures. 3 The students had difficulty in generating ideas. - Most of students were confused in what they had to write. - Their writing had less supporting - Giving the students a model text functioning as the input of language. - Implementing the second step of PWIM technique identifying and labeling the