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Before the students did the exercise, the writer had explained the main idea and the subject of the sentence they would arrange. However, no one could rearrange
the words into a good one. The analysis of those parts could be summarized that, in dealing with
simple present tense, the students faced three problems. The first problem was they were confused on how to use verbs to state daily events or activities and
general fact. The second problem was they had not been aware of the existence of time reference in the sentences. The last problem was they found difficulties in
deciding the verbs and to be following singular and plural subjects. Next, the writer also found four problems in case of learning simple past
tense. First, they did not pay attention to the use of time reference. Second, they had not memorized the past participle forms of the irregular verbs well. Third, in
case of compound sentence, they still had misunderstanding with the use of the verbs which usually applied the same time reference. Fourth, they had a problem
with the meaning of simple vocabulary which appeared in the pre test.
c. Results from Interview
The second instrument used in this study was to conduct an interview with an English teacher of the first grade students. The interview aimed to know the
students’ learning progress related to the learning of simple present tense and simple past tense, the students’ difficulties in English learning, the activities,
media and other sources that the teacher usually used to teach, and the teacher’s opinion about computer-based exercises.
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The teacher said that the students had a good progress in the learning although at the beginning, their knowledge of English grammar and vocabulary
were not good. Nevertheless, the indicators, stated on the syllabus at school, had not been achieved completely. It was because the students still needed to be taught
the same topic more than once. Therefore, it would need longer time to attain all the indicators in the syllabus.
Next, the very basic difficulty that the students had was they thought that English was difficult, so it closed their mind to learn English. Therefore, the
teacher often taught them in the simplest way in order to change their mind that English is easy. The teacher stated also that the students needed to improve their
vocabulary together with tenses. The teacher also used some activities, media, and sources to teach the
students. The activity that the teacher usually gave to the students was asking them to work in group to make a conversation and do certain exercise. Besides,
the teacher used certain media, such as picture and real object, and other sources, such as copied exercises from certain module. She had not ever used computer,
whether or not it was online and offline computer, to learn English. In the learning of tenses, she gave the explanation about some rules, pattern, and examples by
using it. After that, the students were given some passages related to tenses being taught.
Regarding the media that would be designed in this study, the teacher agreed that it must be more interesting media to learn English. However, it was
necessary to consider its effectiveness as the solution of achieving better English
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learning. She would support everything which was new and could support the learning process.
d. Classroom Observation
