Background of the Study

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CHAPTER I INTRODUCTION

This study is intended to produce a set of supplementary English instructional materials using short stories to promote the students’ values of life for the sixth grade of elementary school students. This chapter introduces the study elaborately. There are several matters in this chapter. They are; background of the study, problem identification, problem limitation, problem formulation, objectives of the study, benefits of the study, and definition of terms.

A. Background of the Study

English has gained rising popularity over the years in Indonesia. English has become an international language which is used in Indonesia in almost all aspects of life; hence English is an important language to learn, to develop science, technology and culture and to build relationship with other countries in the world. Depdikbud, 1994:3 Considering the reasons, people have become aware of the need to learn English earlier starting from childhood. In Indonesia, English formally is taught as a local content in elementary school, starting in the fourth grade. The implementation of the current curriculum which is called KTSP Kurikulum Tingkat Satuan Pendidikan and broadly translated into Education Unit Level Curriculum, supports the previous government policy that allowed each region to provide particular subject which was called local load. In general, KTSP objectives consider both the students’ skills and character development. It means that schools are obliged to create teaching-learning activities and strategies that help and motivate students to have good basic knowledge and also good personality before entering the next level. Drake 1999 states that education fails if its outcome is an individual student, who is intelligent, skilled and knowledgeable but unable to live, work and make positive relationship with others. English, one of the subjects taught in school, should create teaching-learning activities that can facilitate the students to improve their academic and personal competence. If the students do not have good personal competence, this will influence the students’ mastery, not only English but also in other subjects. To gain the objectives of curriculum, the writer designs a set of supplementary English instructional materials using short stories to promote the students’ values of life for the sixth grade of elementary school students. On account of the objectives of the curriculum, the writer designs a set of supplementary English instructional materials to provide the students with some learning experiences through reading short stories. The use of short stories as reading materials can facilitate the students to learn both cognitive and affective domain. Reading is often used as a means to facilitate teaching-learning activities or to increase the results of academic learning. Moreover, reading can be used to improve the students’ personal competence. Personal competence can be achieved if the students have values in their lives as their guidance. As supported by Klausmier and Goodwin 1997: 375-377 that reading can be used to facilitate value learning in a way that reading can be used as an exemplary model and a way to extend informative experience. In this study the writer used integrated skills theory and modified some teaching techniques to support the supplementary English materials using short stories to promote the students’ values of life, such as story telling, singing a song, answering questions from the story, games, making handicraft, discussion, and playing drama. Those techniques are meant to help the students practice the language skills, and to support the teaching-learning activities to motivate students and to make the students enjoy their learning activities and also to promote the students’ values of life. Teaching children is very different from teaching adults. They frequently change their mood every other minute and they are unlikely to be interested in reading stories by themselves because they have low ability in reading and writing. Thus, educators should create a variety of techniques in teaching English, which are interesting and enjoyable for elementary children. According to Petty, et al. 1989: 85 young children learn a language best when they have meaningful experiences with it. The variation of techniques also means to help the teachers to explain and to practice both language skills and language elements. Moreover, through reading short stories the students can learn new words faster by looking for the pictures. By presenting the pictures in the given story, the students are assisted to understand the story and the meaning of the words as well as how to use those words correctly.

B. Problem Identification