Background of the Study

CHAPTER I INTRODUCTION

1.1 Background of the Study

Language is something that is used for communicating in spoken and written. According to Ramelan 2003: 1, “Man speaks a language as a means of communication with other people, as tool to express his ideas and wishes. Without language it is hard to imagine how people can cooperate and get along with another”. One of the languages in the world is English. English is one of the most important languages. There are some reasons why English is really considered very important and has to be taught in Indonesia. First, as a developing country, Indonesia has to cooperate with other countries to carry about the development in all fields. In this position, English is really needed since it is used as an International language. Second, Indonesia has to mastery English as an international language because in science and technology developments the information Indonesia cannot work alone. Here, English is used as a tool to understand and develop the information of science and technology progress. Knowing that the advantages of English for the development, our government always makes effort to improve the quality of the English teaching in Indonesia by stressing and taking it as a compulsory subject to be taught to the Junior High School and Senior High School. Our government stated in Content of Standard for English subject that is that English is a tool for communicating in spoken and written. Communicating is to understand and give information, thought, and feeling and develop the knowledge, technology and culture. There is difference between spoken and written language. Written language is more complex than spoken language, because it needs correctness of grammar, content of words lexical items, and also punctuation. Halliday 1985: 61 stated that written language displays much higher ratio of lexical items to total running words. If we often use written language, it means that we use a lot of lexical items. Halliday 1985: 64 also explained that the number of lexical items as a proportion of the number of running words is called lexical density. In English it self there are four skills and four components, which have to be mastered. The skills, they are listening, speaking, reading, and writing and the components consist of phonology, grammar structure, vocabulary, and fluency, which are different with our native language. There are no certain directions as how grammar must be taught or learnt. The role of grammar is in part due to changing attitude toward the language it self that make them find difficulties to remember the grammar rules Veit, 1986: 249. As we know that there are many subjects covered in grammar study, the writer limit the discussion into syntax, which is still, has a very close relationship with grammar. Syntax is the study of words are put together Veit, 1986: 6. Based on that statement, syntax discuses the relation of words to other in phrases, clauses, and sentences. It is stated above that one of the language components is structure or grammar that is very important to learn. Its function is to make a string of words or an utterance meaningful. For example of words “beautiful the woman” is un grammatical or meaningless, on the other hand, these words “the beautiful woman” is grammatical and meaningful according to the correct mechanism of arranging words. English is a first foreign language in Indonesia. However, learning English as a foreign language for the Indonesian students is not easy, for the students often have some learning problem. As an example, it can be seen from the difference of grammatical structure occurring English and Indonesia. A large number of English of construction especially in phrase is “Modifier-Head”, whereas in Indonesia is “Head- Modifier”, for example in English says “red flower” in translating “bunga merah” and do not “merah bunga”. In the Content of Standard, we can find that the aim of English subject is developing ability of communication in language, both spoken and written. The ability of communication includes listening, speaking, reading and writing. These abilities are used to create a discourse in society life. Moreover English is hoped to develop those abilities in order to be able to communicate in English in certain level of literacy. This level includes performance, functional, informational and epimistic. In performative level, people can read, write, listen, and speak with the symbols. In functional, people can use language to fulfill their daily needs such as reading newspaper, journal or guidance. In Informational level, people can access knowledge with their ability using the language, and in epistemic level people can express knowledge into the target language. Content of Standard Based on the Content of Standard, Senior High School students are hoped to get informational level because they are prepared to continue their study to the university. It means that it is hoped that the students can create report text by them. In creating text it is important to the students to know about the structure or grammar. As we know that text is one of kind of written text. Written text needs correctness of grammar, lexical density and also punctuation. To create a good report text which has lexical density students can do it by learning construction of noun phrase. The materials which will be given to the students can come from newspaper, magazine or textbook. The teacher has responsibility to select the textbook which will use as a material in teaching learning process. Finocchiaro 1974: 49 stated that he should be able to decide whether the contents of the textbook are suitable with curriculum or not. She wrote that you should examine as many as textbook as possible in the field of teaching English as a second language. The content of the materials in the textbook helps us in teaching learning process. Therefore, it is important for the teacher to select and analyze the content of the textbook. Because of the difficulties faced by most of the students in learning English especially in noun phrase, the writer will focus his research on noun phrase construction found in report genres in the first year Senior High School students’ textbooks.

1.2. Reasons of Choosing the Topic