33
B. Theoretical Framework
English, as the first foreign language which should be taught in Indonesia, has four skills; listening, reading, speaking, and writing. In order to use English as
a language that can be applied by the students well, the researcher focuses on the productive skills which are
shown in students‟ performances. One of the skills that directly showed students‟ performances is writing skill. As stated by Tiedt
1989 that writing skill is the most difficult skill and needs hard work, it is alsi faced by the students. The students consider writing is difficult skill to be
mastered. Referring to the purpose of the curriculum, the students should be able to
write various types of text. Narrative is one of the texts that have to be taught in junior high school level. Based on the observation, Class VIII F students in SMP
Negeri 10 Surakarta faced difficulty in writing narrative text. The thought that writing is difficult skill to be learnt lead them to face some problems because of
the lack of English competence. In the preliminary observation, the researcher found several problems encountered by the students such as grammar, vocabulary,
mechanics, fluency style and quality of expressions, and form organization. As a result, the students
‟ performance in writing text is not satisfying enough. The problems in writing faced by class VIII F students in SMP Negeri 10
Surakarta motivate the researcher to conduct the action research. The researcher plans to conduct classroom action research CAR. The purpose of conducting the
classroom action research CAR is that to answer the research problems and to improve classroom practice Ary et al., 2010; Richard, 2005; Kemmis
34 McTaggart, 1988. There are four stages to conduct CAR stated by Kemmis and
McTaggart 1988, p.15 the dynamic and complementary process, namely: planning, action, observation, and reflection. Specifically, the researcher conducts
CAR based on Kemmis and McTaggart‟s cycle model as presented in the Figure 2.1. The researcher does the cycle twice. Therefore, there are two cycles which
are done in this research. To overcome the problem, the researcher offers to use picture series to
teach writing narrative text. Picture series is chosen as the problem solving, knowing that it provides many advantages. As the researcher stated above,
according to Raimes 1983, pictures are valuable to provide vocabulary and common language forms. Besides, Raimes also states that the use of picture series
is really helpful, because it provides: experiences in the classroom, the need for common language forms to use in the classroom, a variety of tasks, and also a
focus of interest for students. Picture series provide a number of pictures with its several objects, several characters performing different actions which all relating
to the same general themes. I t can be helpful for the teacher to be used as device to teach composition of texts Kreidler, 1968. The use of picture series also
motivates the students to produce words vocabulary. Therefore, they are guided to produce sentences in good structure then lead they organize the idea into a good
story Dunn Finley, 2010; Raimes, 1983. In order to improve the classroom practice, the researcher employs
instruments as the tools to obtain the evidences of this study. By using the evidences, the researcher could reflect the practices whether they are satisfactory
35 or not. The researcher as a practitioner of the classroom action research CAR
will improve her practice if the results are not satisfactory based on the reflection because the goal of the classroom action research is to implement the action and
reflect of the action so that the classroom practice improved Ary et al, 2010; Burns, 2010; Richards, 2005.
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