Background of the Study

1 .

CHAPTER I INTRODUCTION

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

1.1 Background of the Study

English is an important subject that is taught in Indonesia. The purpose of English education in Indonesia is to develop the competence of students in English communication. There are four skills that must be mastered by students. They are listening, speaking, reading, and writing. One of them is reading. Students have to master listening, speaking, reading and writing. Reading is important for students because reading helps them understand many English books. They need reading skill not only for learning something lesson, but also getting experiences, knowledge and everything that can support their study in higher education. By reading, students will increase their vocabulary and idiom. Reading also improves their structure and pronunciation. Students get much crucial information from reading. To have good reading skill is not easy. The problem that is faced by students in Senior High School is low comprehension. They do not understand about the content of the text that they read. Successful readers have to understand the content of the text. Students need practices to improve their reading skill. There are many ways to improve students ‟ reading skill. Students should not only develop their reading skill through formal education and assignment in various reading text books, but also they should read many kinds of reading materials such as magazines, newspapers, articles and novels. Students in senior high school still have difficulties in reading exposition text, especially in reading hortatory exposition text. Anderson 1997:122 states that “an exposition text is a piece of text that presents one side of an issue”. Gerot and Wignell 1995:197- 198 states that ”the social function of hortatory exposition is to persuade the reader or listener that something should or should not be the case”. From those definitions, we can conclude that a hortatory exposition text is a text to persuade the readers. It tells us about many arguments and in the end of the text, the writer gives the recommendation about the text. Many students have difficulties to understand the content of hortatory exposition text. Teacher should find methods to make the students interested and active in reading hortatory exposition text. In this research, I will recommend a method to teach hortatory exposition text. The method is Directed Reading Thinking Activity DRTA. It is a method developed by Russell Stauffer in 1969. We can use it in teaching reading in English, writing, math, social problems and sciences but in this research I will use it in teaching reading hortatory exposition text. DRTA encourages the students to make prediction about the content of the texts. It is used in teaching reading to make students to be active and they make prediction about the text. This method asks students to make prediction about the content of the text. The teacher asks some questions to the students to make the prediction. DRTA has some purposes. The purposes are to encourage the students in reading and elicit students‟ prior knowledge of the topic of the text. It also gives motivation for the students to read and understand the texts. This research analyzes the effectiven ess of DRTA to improve students‟ ability in reading hortatory exposition text. I use Pre experimental research to know that the DRTA is effective to improve students‟ ability in reading hortatory exposition text.

1.2 Reasons for Choosing the Topic