Background of the Study

CHAPTER 1 INTRODUCTION

This chapter presents the introduction of the study. It consists of background of the study, reasons for choosing the topic, statement of the problem, objective of the study, hypotheses, significances of the study, limitation of the study, and outline of the study.

1.1 Background of the Study

Language is a system of communication consisting of sounds, words and grammar, or the system of communication used by the people of a particular country or profession. By using language, people can express feelings, ideas, and attitude, so that they can cooperate and get along with each other. English is the first foreign language in our country, which is taught from Elementary level to University level. English is also intensively used in international communication, in written as well as in spoken communication. In addition, many books of science, technology, art and other published issues are written in English. As we know that learning a foreign language has different aspects and systems, which should be understood by the learners, such as pronunciation, spelling, and the cultural background of the language. English is also as a part of our national education. It has important roles in students‘ intellectual, social, and emotional and as an important key to be 1 successful in learning all lessons. The government has arranged the curriculum named Kurikulum Tingkat Satuan Pendidikan KTSP. This curriculum is the development of the Competence Based Curriculum CBC. Both of them have the same purpose of developing skills of understanding and producing various short functional and monologue texts and essay in the form of narrative, descriptive, recount, procedure, news item, report, analytical exposition, spoof, and hortatory exposition text. As we know, in every year and every grade of students of junior high school and senior high school, not to mention for elementary school, genres are always been taught. It shows that genre is a part of writing skill that cannot be separated from the learning process. In teaching writing, especially in writing genre, teachers should give the explanation about the generic structures and the lexicogrammatical features of the genre. It is important to share to students because in the real life they can find some problems that make them must understand about the genre. For example: in the interview section, students must describe about their characteristics. Therefore, they should know and understand better how to describe about themselves. It means that the learning of genres is important in the real life. In learning English, there are integrated skills to be mastered such as: listening, speaking, reading, and writing. As Haycraft states 1978:8 that ―there are various skills in mastering of language: respective skill, listening understanding the spoken language, reading understanding the written language, and productive skills- speaking and writing‖. It means that the English teachers should teach those four aspects, not only listening and speaking skills but reading and writing should also be taught to the students so that they are able to master all the four language skills well. However, they have to be supported by language components such as grammar, vocabulary, sound system, and so on. This is the reason why do mastering language skills without knowing their components well is hard to do. For instance, in writing skill, at least the students have to know grammar and vocabulary well enough. The students must have good communication in both oral and written form. Oral form is that speaking and listening, and written form is that writing in reading. There are many text types taught to Junior High School students. One of them is descriptive text. Descriptive is a kind of genre that is used to describe a particular person, place or thing. One of the problems faced by the students when they write descriptive text is they do not understand the generic structure and the limitation of using the grammatical structure because in this grade, second grade students of junior high school, learn more complex kinds of text. The students have difficulties in composing descriptive writing. Some of them feel difficult in composing descriptive writing such as: stucking to get diction, getting idea, and ordering the words. Based on the problem above, the teacher should give a strategy to help the students. As Brown 2000:113 stated that ―strategies are specific methods of approaching a problem or task, modes of operation for achieving a particular end, planned designs for controlling and manipulating certain information‖. Chamot in Masdari 2005:5 states that ―learning strategies are techniques, approaches, or deliberate the learning and recall of both linguistic and content information‖. In this case, the writer would give study tour strategy to increase the students‘ writing skill in descriptive text. In teaching learning process, there are a lot of strategies which are used by teachers, but the writer uses study tour method to increase the students‘ learning result in writing. Through this method, students will work outside of the class to observe situation around them, so they can feel free in writing. If it is possible, the writer would like to invite students to tour to interest places. From the above explanation, the writer will discuss about ―The effectiveness of using study tour method to increase students‘ skill in writing descriptive text‖ which is conducted at the second grade students of SMP Takhassus Al- Qur‘an Wonosobo.

1.2 Reasons for Choosing the Topic