Background of the Research

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CHAPTER 1. INTRODUCTION

In this chapter, some aspects will be presented. These include background of the research, problems of the research, objectives of the research, and significances of the research. They will be presented in the following sections.

1.1 Background of the Research

English is placed in the highest priority among languages in the world that is used as a means of communication. It is also used in almost various aspects of human life such as science, politics, social life, technology and education. English is a global language that about a quarter of the world’s population is already fluent and competent in English Crystal, 2003:6. Therefore, English plays an important role for communication among people over the world and people cannot deny they need to master English to communicate well. In educational institution system in Indonesia, English is important that must be taught from junior high school level to university level to face the globalization era. For junior high school students, English is taught as a compulsory subject. According to Brown 2000:232, in learning English the students are require to master four language skills, namely listening, speaking, reading, and writing. Besides those four language skills, students should acquire the language components, vocabulary, grammar and pronunciation. Therefore, teachers should implement teaching learning process of English that reflects the four language skills and the three language components. Writing can be considered to be a very important skill among the other skills of English for the students to be mastered. Based on the Institutional Level Curriculum KTSP 2006, students studying at the seventh grade of junior high school 2 especially in second semester are required to be able to write a paragraph or a text in the genre of descriptive. However, writing is not easy. According to Heaton 1988:135, writing skill is complex and sometimes difficult to teach to the students. The students who learn English as the foreign language often find difficulties in writing. There are several component which need to be considered by the students while the process of writing. According to Brown 2000:244-245 those components are content, vocabulary, language use and punctuation that should be considered in order to write well. In writing process the students have to compose their writing by using their own choice of sentence structure and organize their own ideas in a good paragraph. Based on the preliminary study that the researcher conducted at SMPN 2 Dringu in the form of interview the English teacher. It was intended to get the basic information about the students’active participation during the teaching learning process of English and to get the information about the previous score of writing test. The result of the students’ previous writing score showed that only 18 students 58.06 of 31 students who got score ≥ 70. Only 50 of the students in class VII A were actively participated during the teaching learning process of English. Based on the result of the informal interview that I did with the students, I found all the students’ problems were on starting to write, finding the ideas to write, and constructing sentences. In addition, the teacher said that those following reasons were considered as the causes of that condition. First, the teacher thought that they still have difficulties in generating and organizing their ideas well in the written form. They could not find the ideas what to write and how to develop it. Second, the teacher found that many of the students did many errors in grammar. They used incorrect subjectverb agreement such as “He is wear a tidy cloth” instead of writing “He wears tidy clothes”. The last problem was related to the vocabulary. The students had limited vocabulary and faced some difficulties in understanding the words meaning, so they used wrong words in writing. 3 Besides, from those problems above the researcher found that some of the students were not interested in learning writing. Furthermore, the English teacher did not use any media in teaching writing. The teacher taught writing by following materials in the textbook and for the students’ writing task the teacher asked the students to translate the text from Indonesia to English. Thus, the students felt bored because the teacher just explained the material from the text book after that asked the students to write a paragraph based on the exercises provided in LKS. So, it made the students unmotivated in learning writing and only a few students were active in the teaching learning process of writing. Based on the problems that happened in the classroom, the researcher and the English teacher discussed and agreed to conduct Classroom Action Research in class VII A to solve their writing problem. O’Brien 1998:1 states that one of the focuses in classroom action research is solving the real problem. So, the main purpose of conducting this classroom action research was to solve the real problem faced by the students of class VII A, especially about their problem in learning writing. The individual pictures were believed to improve the students’ descriptive paragraph achievement, to motivate the students, to attract the students’ attention and to help the students’ generate their ideas. According to Wright 1989: 22, pictures can motivate learners and to remind them what to say. Therefore, to solve the students lacked of vocabulary, by looking at the pictures that each picture contains of different objects and vocabularies, it would help the students understand directly about the meaning of the words and easier to remember new vocabulary that they got. Therefore, the students’ problem in finding the ideas could be solved by using individual pictures because they only tell anything that they could see in the pictures and write it down meaningfully in the form of good paragraph writing. The individual pictures were believed to improve the students’ writing and they could help them generate, elaborate and organize their ideas. It was proved by the classroom action research results done by Halim 2011 entitled Improving The Grade VIII-C Students’ Writing Achievement Of Recount Paragraph By Using Single 4 Pictures at SMPN 2 Puger. The objectives of his study was to know the use of single pictures to improve students’ writing achievement in teaching recount paragraph and investigated the students’ participation during teaching writing a recount paragraph by using single pictures. The result showed that the students’ motivation in writing recount paragraph improved. The similar action research done by Prakasa 2013 entitled the effect of using single pictures on the seventh grade students’ descriptive paragraph writing achievement at MTs Negeri 2 Jember. The objective of his study was to find out the use of single pictures could improve the students’ writing achievement in teaching descriptive paragraph. This technique could improve the students’ writing in experimental class which the results of experimental class were higher than the control class. Based on the explanation above, the results of the research above showed that single pictures or individual pictures could improve the students’ achievement in writing a paragraph. In this research, the researcher tried to apply individual pictures during the teaching learning process of writing. By using individual pictures as the media of learning, the researcher wanted to increase students’ active participation during the teaching and learning process of writing and improve students’ achievement in writing descriptive paragraph. Therefore, the researcher conducted a classroom action research entitled “Improving the Seventh Grade Students’ Achievement in Writing a Descriptive Paragraph by Using Individual Pictures at SMP Negeri 2 Dringu”.

1.1. Problems of the Research