Background of the Study

CHAPTER I INTRODUCTION

A. Background of the Study

Communication is the heart and the soul of the human experience. The process of human communication mainly consists of listening, speaking, reading and writing. Those skills appear in language. Learning a language means learning language skills. Those should be well-mastered by the students if they intend to be able to communicate and to share their ideas, feelings, and opinions with other people. Mastering the four language skills especially in English language is very important for the students to interact with people around the world. There are some components influencing the mastery of four language skills, for instance, vocabulary and grammar. Mastering vocabulary and grammar play large role in language spoken and written forms. Wilkins in Thornburry 2002: 13 states that without vocabulary, nothing can be conveyed. Then, Harmer 2001 says: “Grammar is important component in learning English in order to gain competency in using English. Furthermore Harmer 2001: 12 says: “if grammar rules are too carelessly violated, communication may suffer,…” Those statements show how important vocabulary and grammar in learning a language especially English. Grammar as one of the components supporting language skills is very important to learn since it affects meanings and messages that the person wants to convey. Using incorrect grammar may become our messages meaningless and unclear. Any person who communicates using a particular language is 1 perpustakaan.uns.ac.id commit to user consciously or unconsciously aware of the grammar of that language. There are many grammatical items in English as it has been quoted above; one of them is tense. Tense is a form of a verb used to indicate the time, and sometimes the continuation or completeness of an action in relation to the time of speaking. There are about some tenses learnt and widely used in English, such as simple present, present perfect and simple past. The tenses will help students be able to make the sentences grammatically correct both in speaking and writing. Learning English as a foreign language may have many difficulties to learn by the students especially in learning grammar. Grammatical items such as tenses are quiet complicated to learn by the students, since each item has certain rules that must be obeyed while using them in language. The same difficulties were also occurred in the first grade of class A of English Department students of Siliwangi University. The data were obtained from the pre-test of tenses given to the students covering simple present, present continuous, simple past, past continuous, and present perfect, and it showed that there were many students who still got low scores. The students who got scores under the criteria of success, 65, consist of 28 students from 42 students. The mean score the students reached in this pre-test was 59. The lowest score is 32 and the highest is 82. It means that there were still many students who had difficulties in learning grammar especially in learning tenses. The result showed the description that the students still had difficulties in using auxiliary verbs, regular and irregular verbs, the form, and the function of the tenses. They got difficulties in making meaningful sentences and using appropriate tense in a sentence. Moreover, the students also stated that one commit to user of their difficulties in grammar was the verb agreements. They further said that they often difficult to decide what verb they had to use in a sentence. Another problem appeared when the students learned grammar was the classroom condition or situation. There were some indicators I obtained from initial research. The first, the students tended not to take apart in the learning process; they often didn’t pay attention or listen when I explained the material. The second, the students sometimes felt nervous when joining the grammar class. The third, the students who were smarter in the classroom tended to dominate the learning process. And the last is the grammar activities tended to be monotonous. The students usually did individual tasks more than cooperative tasks. Having looked at the problems, there were three causes why these problems happen. Those causes were: 1 the students thought that learning grammar was not only very complicated but also less important to learn because they thought they still could communicate using English without mastering grammar, 2, I seldom provided the students with interactive activities so the students tended to be passive 3 the teaching learning process tended to be teacher-centered than students-centered so I tended to dominate the class, 4 I often made the students under pressure with by correcting their mistakes directly. After regarding the problems and the causes, I considered that the students’ knowledge of grammar and their mindsets of the importance of learning grammar should increase. I as the teacher also should make the students comfortable in learning grammar and not make them nervous while teaching learning. Besides, I should create the class more students-oriented in order they perpustakaan.uns.ac.id commit to user explore their grammar knowledge. To cope it, I proposed task-based language teaching as a solution to deal with the problems. Task-based language teaching or task-based instruction is one of the methods generated from communicative approach which applies some interactive and meaningful activities engaging the learners to comprehend or to produce an outcome using the target language. The tasks applied in this method are different from the traditional tasks in which the teacher instructs the students to complete the exercise. Nunan 2004: 4 defines that: a task is a piece of classroom work that involves learners in comprehending, manipulating, producing or interacting in the target language while their attention is focused on mobilizing their grammatical knowledge in order to express meaning, and in which the intention is to convey meaning rather than to manipulate form. The task should also have a sense of completeness, being able to stand alone as a communicative act in its own right with a beginning, a middle and an end. The definition is in accordance with the principal of teaching grammar in communicative approach that teaching grammar should be taught explicitly and implicitly Seung Hee, 2005: 2. Generally, the phases of teaching using task-based consist of three phases; 1 Pre-task. It is the introduction to the topic and task provision of useful input listening, reading, brainstorming, etc. 2 Task Cycle. In this phase, the students, commonly work in small groups, are encouraged to accomplish the task and present it in written or spoken form. The teacher monitors the students’ work and provides help for them in order that they are motivated 3 Post-task. It focuses on the language used, and consists of practice of the language as necessary and perpustakaan.uns.ac.id commit to user retrospective discussion of the task-awareness-raising. It is important to emphasize that tasks in task-based language teaching should have very clear objectives and conclude with a very tangible sense of achievement for the learners Willis in Richards, 2006:33. Choosing task-based language teaching in teaching grammar would provide the students some interactive tasks that should be accomplished using the target language they are learning so the students improve not only their language skills but also their grammatical competence. By applying the three basic steps of task-based language teaching in grammar class, the students will produce the language they are learning directly and be aware of the language rules at the same time. Harmer 2007: 73 says that the opportunities for production may force students to pay close attention to form and to the relationship between form and meaning. Further, Rojas 1992: 173 argues that language structures must not be taught in isolation but integrated to the four skills of language. In this case, using task-based has changed the way of teaching and learning grammar from the traditional way into more communicative one. The main objective of this change focuses on the development of communicative grammatical competence, which is understood as the ability to use and understand a structure in a variety of situation spontaneously. Although task-based language teaching is considered as one of the approaches to implement communicative approach and, as with the communicative approach in general, one of the features of task-based language teaching that often worries teachers is that it seems to have no place for the perpustakaan.uns.ac.id commit to user teaching of grammar. Actually grammar is as important in a communicative approach as in any other approach. That is to say, grammar applies with equal force to task-based language teaching. In accordance with the above explanation, I would apply the use of task- based language teaching in grammar class to cope with the problems occurring in that class. When the students are provided by various interactive and meaningful tasks, there is no doubt that the students would not only improve their grammar mastery but they would also experience the learning process in a better class condition. However, this research would be specified in one of the grammar indicators, that is tense.

B. The Problem Statement