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students to be more active, develop their higher-order thinking, and get information in the expertise level. This is because the more realistic the language,
the more easily it can cater the range of proficiency levels found in many classes. The last, authentic materials support a more creative approach to teaching.
Using authentic materials can be an informative manner of communication that is conducive to interactive learning. It can be effectively linked with ways of helping
students to be more independent learners. For example, whwn students have to make prediction and guess using reference books, use authentic materials can be
an effective one Hwang, 2005
3. Teaching Present Past tense Using Authentic Materials
The aim of English learning according to the school-based curriculum 2006 is to achieve students communicative competence. The students are
expected to master five competencies: linguistic competencies vocabulary, grammar, punctuation, intonation, etc., socio-cultural competence the way to
communicate such as language style, politeness, etc., discourse competence contexts, strategic competence the competence to overcome problems or
difficulties in communication, and functional competencies listening, speaking, reading, and writing. Those competencies can be achieved through three aspects,
i.e. cognitive, psychomotor, and affective. Teaching present and past tense with authentic materials as the media is
hoped to stimulate students’ interest to English subject. And the perfect way to combine the application of authentic materials in teaching present past tense is
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through writing. Writing is one of fields in English which covers the use of tenses inside it, especially present and past tense for grade tenth students of high school.
Based on the preliminary observation at SMA 1 Wanadadi, the first grade students in second semester have twelve hours to get the teaching and learning
process of writing. It means that they wrote some texts twice in a month. In the class, the teachers hardly ever use interactive media in teaching and learning
process especially in writing. The students just write based on what teachers asked. Then, they submit their work and wait for the correction and the feedback.
However, when the students got many corrections in their work, they just accept to what the teacher evaluate on their work. Sometimes, they do not even
understand what the teacher means by the marks. Exactly, the students ignore the teacher’s comments and they have no motivation to ask about the teacher’s
comments. And that fact above is exactly the reason of why we should use interesting
as well as attractive teaching media but it should not bother or burden the teachers and authentic materials are exactly the answer for that need. In the class, the
teacher use jumbled paragraphs, picture series, and rewriting activities to teach writing. The point of using authentic materials is to raise students’ interest to get
near to English so that they can master it as a whole since if they do not like the subject, then the obstacles in learning English will just become bigger and harder.
