1
CHAPTER I INTRODUCTION
A. Background of the Research
English is very important in the daily life. As an International language, it plays important role in communication which mostly many people are
involved in. English has many interrelationships with various aspects of life owned by human being. Therefore, English as a compulsory object is taught at
junior and senior high schools in Indonesia. In English, there are four skills that should be mastered. They are
listening, speaking, reading, and writing. Listening and reading are receptive skills because learners do not need to produce language to do these, they
receive and understand it, on the other hand, speaking and writing are productive skills because learners need to do these to produce language. They
are also known as active skills. The writing skill becomes very important in the education field.
Therefore, students need to be exercised and trained in order to have a good writing skill. Writing is a complicated process of problem solving which
involves controlling the text, reaching the purpose of writing the thoughts in the text, planning-arranging the thoughts and collecting data for the target
Chen and Zhou, 2010. Writing in second language is assumed to be more difficult than that in the first language. To some extents, the writing disabilities
are caused by problems in vocabulary and grammar. However, an understandable and acceptable writing not only depends on vocabulary and
grammar but also has to be well sequenced, cohesive, coherent, and appropriate with its purpose.
Nowadays, English language is studied in all levels of school. In junior high school, where the students have not understood yet about English,
commonly their English proficiency is still low. Based on School Based Curriculum or KTSP, students in junior high schools have to be able to not only
understand the nature of English but also produce certain various short functional texts, monologues and essays in the form of procedure, descriptive,
recount, narrative and report. It becomes a challenge to the teacher to teach in a writing class. Nevertheless, writing is needed to be taught as early as possible
so the students can achieve better understanding and practice on it. Furthermore, the act of writing is an essential activity for them in their future
academic life. However, not all students like the method which is used by their
teachers. In fact, learning English with the same teaching technique makes the students bored. Especially in writing, sometimes students are lack of idea. That
is why teachers need various methods which can encourage students’ creativity and sense of writing. The teacher should make use of available resources to
develop students’ creativity in learning English, especially in writing. In the implementation of teaching and learning process of English, the
improvement of basic skills of language is still hard to achieve and one of them is in writing skills. Writing is usually considered as the most frustrating skill to
master for the students who are learning English. As well as the other skills,
writing is a skill that must be improved by the students. In the process of teaching and learning writing, some teachers do not know how to teach writing
appropriately. They usually ask the students to write sentences as many as they can but they do not know how to make their students do the instruction. This
fact motivated the research to focus on encouraging the students to write recount or to tell stories of their past experience in the written form.
B. Identification of the Problem
Kategori