Background of the Study

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CHAPTER I INTRODUCTION

This chapter deals with introduction of the study which consists of background of the study, reasons for choosing the topic, statements of the problem, purposes of the study, significance of the study, limitation of the study, and outline of the report. Tomake it complete, definition of terms is also provided.

1.1 Background of the Study

As language teachers, we know that in Indonesia, English subject is taught in school from kindergarten until university. There are four skills that have to be mastered by students, those are speaking, reading, listening, and writing skills. Speaking and listening are oral language, and reading and writing are written language. In writing skill, students have to be able to compose a text based on the genre. Genre is a kind of text- type, Gerot and Wignell 1994:17 stated ―a genre can be defined as a culturally specific text-type which results from using language written and spoken to help accomplish something.‖ Knowledge of genre is important for language teachersin order to help the students composing texts. There are some types of genre that is taught in school such as narrative, recount, report, procedure, discussion, explanation, exposition, etc. A recount text is a text that retells someone‘s experience in the past. Students in junior high school haveto be able to compose recount texts, and they also have to be able to convey the meaning of the text based on social function, generic structure and 2 lexicogrammatical features of recount text. According to Gerot and Wignell 1994:17, ―genre is culture specific, and has associated with them: particular purposes, particular stages, and particular linguistic features.‖ Therefore, the researcher as a language teacher who hastrained to practice teaching students in school found that most of them have difficulties in writing text. There are still some students who have difficulties in creating meaning through texts. It happened because writing skills is a difficult skill than other skills. G raham and Perin 2007:7 stated that ―Many adolescent are able to handle average reading demands but have severe difficulties with writing.‖ Writing is a difficult skill for students. In writing, students have to make and analyze the topic of writing to create written texts; it needs extra effort to think. Students also have touse language meaningfully in composing texts, so they will be able to convey meaning from the texts. Students must have the ability to make sentences and arrange them into some paragraphs. If they cannot do this, they fail to compose good written texts and fail to convey meaning in order to communicate with others. The meaning of language will be clearer by using grammar; it is considered from the definition of grammar itself. According to Derewianka 2001:1, ―Grammar is a way of describing how a language works to make meaning.‖ Grammar can be divided into traditional grammar, formal grammar and functional grammar. The difference between traditional and formal grammar is in the term of the definition. They concerned with the form of language syntax, whereas functional grammar concerns more in the function of language. Based on Gerot and Wignell 1994:5, ―traditional grammar is Standard English by comparing it with Latin, it focus o n rules producing correct sentences.‖ Functional grammar focuses to describe the structure of individual sentences. We can know the meaning of language by analysing the Functional grammar. Halliday and Hasan 1989:10 stated ―We can define text, in the simplest way perhaps, by saying that it is language that is functional, by functional, we simply mean language that is doing some job in some context, as opposed to isolated words or sentences that I might put on the blackboard.‖ We can analyze the meaning of text either spoken or written text. So, functional grammar has important role for the researcher in finding the meaning of language in form of text, both spoken and written text. This study is going to investigate what meaningsare realized in written text composed by junior high school students by using metafunctionss approach. The text that is chosen by the researcher is recount text. There are three kinds of meaning in metafunctions, Halliday 2000 in Feng and Liu 2010:1 stated that ―language has three meta-functions, the ideational, the interpersonal and the textual.‖ According to Butt et al 1995:13-14, ―the ideational metafunctions uses language to encode our experience of the world and to convey a picture of reality. The interpersonal metafunctions uses language to encode interaction and to show how defensible or binding we find our proposition or proposal. The textual metafunctions uses language to organize our experiential, logical, and interpersonal meanings into a coherent, in the case written and spoken language, linear, whole.‖ In this study, the researcher will analyze each sentence of the students in composing a text to get the meaning. The researcher will analyse the three metafunctions meanings; those are ideational meanings, interpersonal meanings, and textual meanings of students‘recount text in junior high school students. This study is expected canhelp the teacher to analyze the ability of the students in composing recount text and know the meaning based on the text.

1.2 Reasons for Choosing the Topic