Background to the Problem

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CHAPTER 1 INTRODUCTION

A. Background to the Problem

In the middle of 2013, the Indonesian Government, through the Ministry of Education and Culture issued a new curriculum to replace the School-Based Curriculum or KTSP. The new curriculum is called Curriculum 2013. Curriculum 2013 is, in some ways, different from the previous curriculum. This curriculum explicitly encourages students to learn values. Another significant difference is that Curriculum 2013 uses the scientific approach as the basis in the teaching and learning process. The changes in the curriculum affect all the subjects including English. English is one of the subjects which are taught in schools. According to Curriculum 2013, English should be taught following the scientific steps. However, English course books for senior high school, the steps are still text- based. This is similar to the previous curriculum. While the components and the materials in Curriculum 2013 are all good, the implementation of Curriculum 2013 cannot be said to be perfectly and efficiently done. It is mainly because not all components which support the curriculum, such as learning materials still have some shortcomings. In reality, the implementation of a new curriculum should be equipped with all of the components that support the instructional process, such as syllabus, media, and learning materials. For English for vocational high school, the learning materials for English language instruction are still not appropriate to be used. Referring to Law Number 20 Year 2003: vocational high school is a secondary school level of which the instruction process aims to equip students with the skills and knowledge of particular fields and prepare them to be able to work in particular fields and also to provide students with necessary knowledge and skills in order for them to be able to continue their education based on their vocational study programs. This means vocational high school students learn in order to achieve a specific goal: preparing themselves to work in their particular field of jobs. It is different with general high school in which the general high school is a school which aims to make students prepare themselves to continue their study in a higher level of education. Vocational high school students and general high school students have different learning goals and different needs. Therefore, their learning materials should also be different. However, in Curriculum 2013, it is found that vocational high schools and general high schools have the same English learning materials, even the course books that they use are the same. The English learning material that all the high schools got are all about General English. It also happens to the Welding Engineering department in SMKN 1 Sedayu. Welding Engineering department is one of the many departments in SMKN 1 Sedayu. Here, the needs of English is quite high but the students’ proficiency of English is still quite low. Teachers in SMKN 1 Sedayu believe that the English learning materials that are used in the class becomes one of the major factors which can improve the students’ proficiency. In order to do this, the teachers believe that the learning materials intended for students of Welding Engineering department should consist of topic, content, and vocabulary list which are relevant to their field of expertise. In response to this, teachers in SMKN 1 Sedayu created their own learning materials by adapting some learning materials from various resources. It is done because the teachers think that General English is not what their students need. Learning General English is only a waste of time and their students will only gain very little advantage learning it. Therefore, teachers in SMKN 1 Sedayu try to develop new learning materials which are more suitable to be used in the class. Even so, teachers in SMKN 1 Sedayu said that it was just an emergency measure and they were still waiting for the new learning materials for vocational high school to be made. Therefore, there is a need to develop learning materials which can be used in SMKN 1 Sedayu.

B. Identification to the Problems