Background of the Study

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CHAPTER I INTRODUCTION

A. Background of the Study

Playgroup as a pre-school education becomes more essential nowadays, especially for the children of 2 to 4 years old and parents who have 2 to 4 years old children. The class activities develop children’s physical and personal growth, namely cooking, singing, playing, and listening to stories. For the parents, playgroup helps them take care of their children. Nowadays, it is common to see that both father and mother work. Consequently, they can not look after their children during the working hours. As the solution, they send their children to playgroup. Playgroup gives basic knowledge and competence to the children. They learn counting from 1 to 10, writing alphabets and their names, and memorizing vocabulary. Besides, the children also learn English as a foreign language. The children learn basic English such as numbers, alphabets, vocabulary of animals and vocabulary of things around them. Even though playgroup has materials of learning English, playgroup does not have standardized curriculum about it. Accordingly, designing a set of English instructional materials for playgroup is necessary. According to Kartono 2004: 21, designing a set of English instructional materials for playgroup is necessary. He stated that the younger the children the easier they study a new language. Moreover, it is believed that children are 2 better learners in mastering second or foreign language than adults. Accordingly, teaching English as foreign language is an important thing, because it will develop children’s competence in English. Designing a set of English instructional materials for playgroup is not easy because students can not be reinforced to learn the materials. The children have to have willingness and interest in learning the materials. In most of teaching learning activities, they learn something while they are playing. According to this condition, the common strategy used in playgroup is in form of learn while playing. Besides, each child has different interest. Some children love singing. Some others, love talking or running. They can learn fast something that interest them much. Otherwise, they need longer time to learn something that is not interesting to them. At some cases, children are failed to achieve best result. Multiple Intelligences was chosen as learning model because it can facilitate the playgroup children in learning English. Multiple Intelligences as the learning model can make the teaching learning activities interesting. In this learning model, the children can learn appropriately with their intelligences, and also can improve their intelligences which are not dominant. Hence, the children will be able to develop their life in whole. Hopefully, this study will help the children learning English with no burden. Moreover, it will help the teachers how to teach English suitable with students’ multiple intelligences. 3

B. Previous Study