1
CHAPTER 1 INTRODUCTION
The objective of this study is to improve students’ writing skill on recount texts through TAD Transition-Action-Details strategy. This chapter
consists of six sections. They are background of the study, identification of the problems, limitation of the problem, formulation of the problem,
objective of the study, and significances of the study.
A. Background of the Study
Language has four skills that have to be mastered in order to communicate well. They are listening, speaking, reading, and writing.
Those skills are related to each other. Inthis case, the researcher focused onthe writing skills. The writing skillsarevery important for some
reasons. The first reason is that writing is important for junior high school students. This skill brings them to understand about written
language. Through writing, the students can share information and ideas. Secondly, they can compose theirstories. Furthermore, writing
can help the students to focus on accurate language use, such as grammar and vocabulary. It may well provoke language development of
the students because they think as they write. Related to teaching writing tojunior high school students, there are
still many schools in Indonesia that apply KTSP 2006 School-Based
2 Curriculum for teaching and learning process. The students must be
able to write and comprehend the text of descriptive, narrative, procedure, and recount. Furthermore, in the syllabus mentioned
precisely in the writing competency standards, students must be skilled in expressing the meaning of a short simple functional text and an essay
written to interact with the immediate environment. Thoroughly, as it is described in the basic competencies students should express the
meaning and rhetorical steps in a short simple essayusing a variety of written language accurately, fluently and thankful to interact with the
immediate environment in the form of recount text and narrative. It means thatthe students have to master writing skill. However, based on
the observation and interview conducted in SMPN 2 Depok, especially in ClassVIII B, the researcher found some problems related to teaching
and learning writing in the field. The problems are explained as follows. The first problem, the English teacher was very seldom to teach
writing skills to the students. Generally, if they were not given any experience in writing a text, it would be difficult for them to create a
text. The second problem came from the students. The students said that they did not understand some components of arecount text such as the
generic structure and the language feature of the text. They informed that they did not really know how to produce arecount text. In addition,
the students still found difficulties to generate and develop the idea. They were confused about what they would write. After that, they
3 should write or produce their own text with limited guidance. Their
problems were also related to spelling, punctuation marks, vocabulary, and grammar.
Based on the problems above, the researcher applied TAD strategy as a means to overcome the obstacles found in the field. It is based on the
assumption that the strategy used provides the students with the joyful ways in doing the task. The students havechances to work together and
involved in a small discussion. So, Transition-Action-Details T-A-D writing strategy focuses not only on creatings a new writing product,
but also activating student’s interactions.
B. Identification of the problems
Kategori