Background of the Study

commit to user 1 CHAPTER I INTRODUCTION

A. Background of the Study

English teaching has the goal to help students to acquire the four language skills namely listening, speaking, reading and writing. To gain four skills, it is very important for students to have an experience in practicing and applying English grammar. Students can not master the language well which is being studied without mastering its grammar. Grammar is guideline for language learner in using the language, involving how to put words in order in the sentences. Therefore, it is important for the learners to study grammar. People or the learners who decide to study grammar because they want to be better writers or because they want to speak a more standard dialect. By studying grammar, we will learn the makeup of the language and so be able to apply what we learned as better listener, readers, speaker, and writers. Penny Ur, a teacher trainer and author of Grammar Practice Activities says there is no doubt that knowledge- implicit or explicit- of grammatical rules is essential for the mastery of language. In the curriculum 2006 p:308, it is stated that on e of the ultimate objective of English instruction for Senior High School or MA students is to develop the English communicative competence to reach the informal level in order that students are able to access many information and knowledge with language. The communicative competence covers four competences namely grammatical, sociolinguistic, discourse and strategic Savignon, 1997:40. Then the scope of English instruction for Senior High School or MA students is supporting competence in which one of the aspects is linguistic or grammatical competence. This competence deals with knowing how to use the grammar and vocabulary of the language to achieve communicative goals, knowing how to do this in socially appropriate way Thornbury, 2001:18. The importance of having grammatical competence, as stated by Hymes, supported by 1 commit to user 2 Canale and Swain in Lock, 1996:266, is as one of the four types of competence that should be included in any definition of proficiency. A proper understanding of the concept of communicative competence would have revealed if it gives no endorsement for the neglect grammar Widowson in Lock, 1996:266. There is no doubt that to be able to use English in real communication, students should master its grammar. Also this is in line with curriculum 2004 p:19 stating that curriculum emphasizes on the need of mastering English grammar because the purpose of teaching and learning English at senior high school level is to prepare the graduates to attend the university. Learning at this level is to study in the context of the language use. Its target gives students the ability to use English that satisfies the need of English for the international level. For the 2 nd language learner, English is the foreign language that is difficult to learn. Brown 1994:193 stated that a principal barrier for 2 nd language acquisition is the interference of the first language system. Language system includes form and meaning. The form of language involves the grammatical structures of language. It is obvious that English grammar is quite different from the grammar of the Indonesian language. In mastering the English grammar, there are many different and complicated rules of the language that must be mastered by the students. They cannot gain the English grammar just by memorizing the rules and trying to understand the explanation from the teacher. The important thing which must be given a special attention is that in learning a foreign language, we must study the rules of language, practice the rules mush and apply them often in the communication. Terrel in Khalid 2003 states; “Language consists of set of rules with an associated lexicon. It follows logically from the model that foreign language students must learn rules of grammar. The suggested sequence is study the rule, practice the rules and then apply the rules in meaningful interactions in the target language”. Considering the explanation above, grammar will be learnt effectively if it is practiced by the student actively. Teaching English grammar to students is they point to study English. In order to convey meaningful ideas and information, students must understand how to make correct sentences. Without correct grammar, the meaning cannot be transferred correctly. commit to user 3 Therefore, grammar is important part in studying a certain language. So, it becomes the English teacher’s duty to teach grammar as good as possible. Learning a language is complicated activity. A lot of researches have been done in to how to make learning effective but, as yet, it remains surprisingly difficult to say with certainty what methods are truly more effective, but it is largely inconclusive. One certain way to raise a group of language teacher to heated discussion is to question their attitude to correction. The question of teacher’s attitude to error and correction is probably the single most important issue in language teacher’s professional development. The kind of activities the teacher encourages in the classroom, and the kind of which the teacher avoids or minimizes, will be strongly influenced by the teacher’s views of the role of error correction in learning. In high school, students may not have received comments on language problems, or they may have received only global remarks such as you need to keep working on your grammar. In order to help students continue to acquire academic English and to correct patterns of error that may persist in their writing, they need structure help. Reid 1982:xi says that naturally ESL students even at advanced level continue to have grammatical weaknesses. Further he said that grammatical problems that are usually found in writing are; punctuations, and sentence structure, a subject-verb agreement tenses, prepositions and so forth. Another supportive statement comes from Ferris and Leki in Hong 2004 who say that ESL students whose interlanguage are still developing, probably need and expect grammar feedback on error from their teacher. In teaching learning process of English as a foreign language, errors made by students have always been a significant concern to almost all language teachers. Errors refers to those features of learner’s utterances which differ form those of any native speakers Corder, 1973:260. Error made by the foreign learner is natural. It means that error in learning foreign language is usually found. Student always make errors in their foreign language use. This problem makes the teacher have to think what he has to do to solve the problem in his foreign language teaching. Teacher becomes confused whether he has to continue the next material or to correct their error and make the remedial course. Most people agree that making mistakes is apart of learning and they also agree that correction is a part of teaching. Many errors always occur in different aspects of language learning. They occur as natural phenomena, for example: commit to user 4 in speaking as well as in writing. The correction of spoken language is also for the correction of written language. If teacher looks carefully at the mistakes the student makes, he will find that the errors cover many different things that happen in language use, and the errors will lead to a misunderstanding. The linguistic mistakes our students make are an important and necessary part of their language learning. Teacher often finds mistakes or errors in their written task for example; the use of grammar and vocabulary. The absence of teacher’s feedback that is expected by the students on their composition may result in ignorance whether the grammar they use in correct form or not. By investigating the students’ error in their writing task, teacher can understand the quantity and the quality of error in their writing task. Those errors of course can be taken as supportive feedback to their students in order to reduce errors made by the students in their coming writing task. Any correction will help them become more accurate in their use of the language. In giving feedback to his students, the teacher may use different kinds of correction techniques. Firstly, the teachers put the certain marks or symbol on the free margin that can be understood clearly by the students. Secondly, the students are given oral explanation and they are asked to study the error they make. So, by putting certain marks or symbol and by giving the oral explanation or some information on their errors, the teacher can help students identify and correct hem in their composition. Edge 1997:50 states that correction should mean helping people to become more accurate, not insisting completely standard English. Involving learning in judgement about correctness also helps them become more accurate in their use of the language. As English teachers at school, they need to provide the students with the information dealing with students’ language learning development, or by giving help to correct the error they create in composition. According to ideas presented by the writer, students can master well the English language if they understand the rules or grammar of its language. When they make errors or mistakes, teacher should overcome this problem by giving feedback in the form of error correction. There commit to user 5 are many errors and mistakes the students make and factors that cause this problem, so teacher should pay attention to it. To support these ideas, the writer had conducted a pre-observation for two weeks on February 6 th -13 th 2010 in the XI IPA 4 students of SMA N 8 Surakarta. He got the results that the students get many problems in learning grammar. For example, they are difficult to understand the pattern of English sentence. Even, the students can not remember it for a long time. This case causes them to make a lot of mistakes in doing the assignments. It can be shown in the result of their pre-observation test score. The mean of the score is 3, 47 which indicates that their grammar mastery is still low. The condition of students’ grammar mastery is supported by the teacher statement, he says “Secara umum untuk grammar saat ini, terus terang, tidak mendapatkan perhatian yang khusus sehingga belum mendapatkan hasil yang memuaskan, karena memang kita belum menemukan teknik yang sesuai untuk bagaimana anak agar dapat mengingat terus dan paham tentang grammar.” Meanwhile, from the students themselves, they have problems with the grammar. They said that they are still confused in some grammar points like the use of modal, the use of pronoun, and the use of past tense. As what has been said by some students “Saya masih bingung mas untuk menggunakan tenses past sehingga masih salah dalam menuliskan kata kerja nya”. The other students say; “Apalagi kalau disuruh menulis, kita pasti kesulitan dan banyak salah nya di grammar”. Based on the finding, the writer concludes that the students’ grammar mastery needs to be improved. Teacher should solve the problem students have and some factors that cause it. This must be one of the teacher’s considerations in maintaining good English teaching process, how to help student’s problem in their grammatical errors. commit to user 6 According to the facts above, the writer is interested in conducting a classroom action research by using teacher’s feedback in order to improve the student’s grammar mastery of the eleventh grade of IPA 4 students of SMA Negeri 8 Surakarta.

B. Problem Statement