Background of the Problem

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CHAPTER I INTRODUCTION

A. Background of the Problem

Language plays a central role in human life. It provides a vehicle for communication, a tool for thinking, a means of creativity and a source of pleasure. An understanding of language and the ability to use it effectively gives students access to knowledge, enables them to play an active part in the society and contributes to their personal growth. Language is the most significant possession of human being. It is a means for human beings to communicate their ideas and to convey information. Listening in English language as a foreign language EFL constitutes a part of essential skills to be taught beside listening, speaking and writing. In studying a language, receptive skills come first than productive skills. In everyday life, listening is the input skill most often used. No other type of language input is as easy to process as spoken language received through listening. Therefore, listening has an important role in understanding spoken language. The roles of listening are to get information and to comprehend the meaning. Listening was the difficult skill based on the observation in teaching practice. In fact, students were unable to comprehend natural spoken English. Most of the students thought that a spoken passage was difficult to understand because speakers speak too fast. As teachers, it is a big challenge for us to improve their listening skills to comprehend the meaning in communication clearly. There are many advantages in good listening skills for students in studying English. For example, good listening skill is a foundation that one should have in order to get any information in oral materials. Therefore, listening is the most important receptive skill to adsorb information of spoken discourse. Based on the researcher‟s observation in teaching practice PPL, the researcher found some problems related to teaching and learning process, especially in using listening materials. The teacher only thought the students to watch films in the whole time, find some expressions, and answer some exercises. Most of the students just kept silent when the class discussion was conducted. Then, they could not answer some exercises clearly given by the teacher. In this case the teacher did not use an appropriate strategy for teaching listening to the students. Based on some problems above, the researcher had tried to find the effective solutions to improve listening skills for students by using film clips to be a learning media. Using film clips allows students to see a whole of paralinguistic behavior, pick up a range of cross-cultural clues, and entry into a whole range of other communication worlds Harmer, 2007:308. Therefore, they can convey the meaning after watching the film clips. This media can be used in pair or group work. The “classroom” may be construed to include any equipment you may be using Brown, 2001: 194. So, this media can be used if the equipment is already good. There are computer, good audio, and projector. Film clips can be created with Windows Media Movie Maker and Ulead Video Studio or we can download from the internet sources. The reasons of why the researcher used film clips were identifying factors influencing the students cannot comprehend the listening activities, identifying factors to consider of students had low achievement in learning the materials, developing plan of action based on the influencing factors, implementing the plan of actions to find out strategic actions and describing significances of film clips in improving students‟ competence.

B. Identification of the Problem