Context of the Research

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CHAPTER III THE RESEARCH METHODOLOGY

A. Context of the Research

This classroom action research was conducted at SMK PGRI 6 Ngawi for six months from September 2010 to February 2011. It is located on Jl. Raya Klitik, KM. 05 Ngawi, East Java. Students can get to the school easily because it is located on the main road connecting east Java and Central Java. They usually ride motor cycle or public transportation which can exactly stop in front of the school to reach there. There are many schools and a government institution surrounding there. Behind and across the school there are rice fields. The students usually choose the school because they are not accepted by the state school because of their low scores of final examination in the previous Junior High School. Most of them come from surrounding villages. Their parents are farmers and labors who do not have much education, so they often should help their parents to work in getting money. Many students do not continue their study after graduating from this school. They tend to look for a job to earn money. SMK PGRI 6 Ngawi has many facilities to support the teaching and learning activities. Almost each class has been equipped with a unit of laptop and LCD. However, the facilities are not sufficient for all students. For example in the computer laboratory only has 30 units, whereas each class consists of about 45 students. So a computer sometimes is used by two students. There are a lot of commit to user 36 extracurricular activities provided such as swimming, volley ball, basket ball, soft ball, dance, music, English zone, scout, broadcasting. Each extracurricular is guided by an advisor. SMK PGRI 6 Ngawi consists of three grade classes. The tenth grade has 9 classes, the eleventh grade consists of 7 classes, and the twelfth grade there are only 4 classes. Each class consists of 40-45 students. There are four kinds of competence field provided namely; business and management, marketing, network computer technique, and broadcasting department. The subject of this classroom action research is the eleventh year network computer technique class one of SMK PGRI 6 Ngawi, 20102011 academic year. The number of students is 45. It consists of 42 female and 3 male students. The researcher purposely takes that class to be researched due to its competency program related to the way of teaching writing by using e-mail and the students have some problems such as: 1 difficulties in the use of punctuation and capital letter; 2 difficulties to select appropriate vocabulary; 3 difficulties to write sentences grammatically; 4 difficulties to make supporting details; 5 difficulties to organize writing well. The classroom action research is conducted to overcome the students’ problems in the teaching and learning process of writing. The researcher is assisted by one of English teachers at SMK PGRI 6 Ngawi as a collaborator in conducting the research. commit to user 37

B. Research Design