Background of the Study

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CHAPTER I INTRODUCTION

A. Background of the Study

Students should acquire four language skills in English learning activities namely: listening, speaking, reading and writing skills, which presented cohesively. Writing is one of the most important language skills which students are expected to be able to understand and create some kind of writing texts to improve their writing skill. As stated in basic competence for students of vocational high school that some kind of writing text which students should master are short functional text, monolog, descriptive, recount, report, procedure, and narrative. BNSP, 2006: 385. Writing is an ability to express ideas and convey the message through written symbols. In writing, students should comprehend the basic elements of language such as vocabulary, grammar, punctuation, and capital letter. Besides, the students also have to be able to arrange ideas in appropriate sentences in making a good writing as stated by Hyland 2003: 3 that one way to look at writing is to see it as marks on a page or a screen, a coherent arrangement of words, clauses, and sentences, structured according to a system of rules. Writing skill is often considered the most difficult one, especially in English language. Nunan 1989: 35 states that learning to write fluently and expressively is most difficulty of the macro skills of all language users regardless commit to user 2 of whether the language in question in a first, second, or foreign language. It means to write fluently and expressively is not easy for the students who study either first language, second or foreign language. They need attention, carefulness, and guidance to learn it and get the purpose of writing. Teaching writing is not easy; there are some difficulties as stated by Penny Ur 1991: 163 that one of the problems in teaching writing is to maintain a fair balance between content and form when defining the requirement and assessing. Heaton also states 1988: 138 that writing skill are complex and sometimes difficult to teach, requiring mastery not only of grammatical and rhetorical devices but also of conceptual and judgmental elements. The eleventh class students of SMK PGRI 6 Ngawi also face some problems above. Based on the survey in field, it is found out that the students’ writing skills still far from the expectation. The students’ writing achievement still can be considered unsatisfying. There are some indicators of the problems, the students have difficulties in: 1 the use of punctuation and capital letter; 2 selecting appropriate vocabulary; 3 writing sentences grammatically; 4 making supporting details; 5 organizing the writing well. It could be seen from the students’ score of the pre test that the mean score of: 1 punctuation and capital letter was 43.25; 2 vocabulary was 48.75; 3 grammar was 31.75; 4 supporting detail was 57.25; and 5 organizing writing was 47.50. Whereas the minimum score of English lesson was 65. commit to user 3 In addition, unfavorable situation is also obvious in teaching and learning process such as: 1 some students do not pay full attention to the teacher’s explanation. They especially who sit down in the back row enjoy typing message by their phone cellular; 2 many students do not do the homework when the teacher ask them to do the task at home. They often copy to their friends’ homework in the class; 3 some students enjoy talking each other during the lesson. Their topics discussion do not relate to the material given by the teacher. It makes the class quite noisy; 4 at the same time, some of them often ask for permission to the teacher to go to the bathroom; and 5 students just keep silent when the teacher ask them to make questions related to lesson given, but when they are asked to do exercise, they cannot do it well. From the preliminary observation, the students’ failure in writing is caused by many things, as 1 the students’ motivation is low due to monotonous teaching and the traditional method used by the teachers in teaching writing; 2 limited time given by the teacher at school. There are only five times forty five minutes in a week to study English at vocational school; 3 their lack of knowledge in grammar and vocabulary; 4 they ignore the rules of mechanical writing; and 5 lack of practices in writing. Based on the identified problems that students have, it is understandable that students’ writing skill is still low. Therefore, it needs to find out a solution to improve students’ writing skill. Nowadays, the use of technology is becoming increasingly important in teaching learning process. Accessing to Information and Communication Technology ICT has become more widespread. Electronic Mail commit to user 4 or e-mail is one of the most used and useful tools around today. Many students do their task by accessing the information through the internet. E-mail, a form of asynchronous computer-mediated communication, has been called the mother of all Internet applications Warschauer, Shetzer, and Meloni, 2000: 3. Since the evolution of networks, computers can offer the students more than drills; they can be a medium of real communication in the target language, including composing and exchanging messages with their teachers and other students in the classroom or around the world. Based on the facts above, the researcher plans to improve the students` writing skill by using e-mail to practice writing. E-Mail is electronic communication that allows people to send and receive a message via a computer to other user. This strategy is selected for some reasons as; the English writing activity through e-mail is something new for the students of SMK PGRI 6. Teachers at SMK PGRI 6 Ngawi seldom or even never use email before. Therefore, the students will be more interested when the teacher use email in teaching and learning process. E-mail is also challenging. This is due to the fact that generally the computer language is English. Most of the students do not understand the meaning of the words so they try to look up the meaning, synonym, and antonym to their dictionaries. It can be done electronically when they type the text before sending it via e-mail. This can solve their difficulties in vocabulary. Besides, they also can check the grammar, punctuation, and capital letter on line on the computer which is connected to the internet when they operate their e-mail. commit to user 5 The use of e-mail in teaching writing can overcome the problem dealing with the limited time for classroom teaching writing because students can do writing outside the class and the teacher can monitor their writing as well. They can send and receive message on e-mail at in a lab, a campus network, or across the Internet. E-mail allows the students to keep in touch with their teachers and other students around the world via mailing list and discussing groups. Unconsciously, they have practiced writing. The more frequent they send and receive an e-mail, the more practices they undergo. By using this media, the researcher attempt to make the learning and teaching process an interesting one in which the students are expected to be motivated in writing and can improve their writing skills as well. Furthermore, besides using e-mail to practice English writing, the researcher uses four steps of Genre Based Approach to teach writing. The researcher gives the learning materials which are essential for the next part of the writing teaching process such as to organize ideas logically and coherently, appropriate vocabularies, grammar, sentence patterns, word order and word choice. The models of the texts are given to the students so that they get more examples of how to construct the text with their partners and individually in practicing the writing. Considering the benefits of e-mail, the researcher has strong belief that utilizing e-mail for teaching writing, there is a significant improvement towards the students’ writing skill. commit to user 6

B. Problem Statements