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1
CHAPTER I INTRODUCTION
A. Background of the Study
Based on School-Based Curriculum Kurikulum Tingkat Satuan Pendidikan 2006 for junior high school, the aim of teaching English is to
develop communicative competence. Having communicative competence here means to understand and express the information, minds and feelings in their
daily life. It is also to develop technology, science, and culture. The learners are expected to master the ability to communicate completely. The ability is
called communicative competence. This is supported by the learners’ linguistic, actional, socio-cultural, and strategic competences in an integrated
way. The learners afterwards are able to produce the spoken and written text realized in listening, speaking, reading, and writing.
One of the four language skills that the students have to master is reading skill. Aebersold and Field 1997: 15 state, “Reading is what happens
when people look at a text and assign meaning to the written symbols in that text”. Moreover, Dawson and Bamman 1997: 1 say, “Reading is truly a
basic mean of learning in all subjects” because in every subject, students’ learning activities involve reading. Through reading, students are able to
expand their view of all things, such as information, ideas, skills, values, and ways of thinking, as it is stated by Williams 1996: 13 below:
The teachers’ reasons of having the learners read a foreign language i.e. English are as follows:
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2 1 Learners can have further practice of language that they have already met
through listening and speaking, 2 They can practice language in order to re-use it in writing,
3 They can learn how to make sense of texts, in order to extract the information they need from them,
4 They can find enjoyment through reading, and finally 5 The teachers can relax from time to time in the classroom.
The objective of teaching reading for junior high school students is providing them with comprehending knowledge. It means that the ability of
reading must be followed by understanding or comprehending the text. The competence standard and the basic competence for the eighth grade want the
students to be able to comprehend meaning. This meaning covers ideational, interpersonal, or textual from various interactive and monolog written texts.
These texts are short functional text and genre, particularly in the form of descriptive and recount. The comprehension of reading is measured from the
ability to identify words’ meaning, main idea, supporting details, factual information, rhetorical steps, and purpose.
However, in reality the students of SMP 14 Surakarta still get difficulties in comprehending the English text. It is indicated by their low
score of reading comprehension. Commonly, the students face the difficulty in finding the main idea and supporting details, in getting meaning of word,
phrase, and sentence, in understanding text organization; and in answering the questions dealing with the text. In addition, the students are not enthusiastic
and interested in learning reading. They find it difficult in comprehending a
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3 text when finding many new vocabularies and look sleepy and bored during
the lesson. The students are not actively engaged in learning activities. Another factor influencing to the problem is the condition of the
students that come from different social situation, creativity, intelligence and others. In the teaching and learning process, frequently, there are some
students that are able to study fast, but some cannot understand the items. Meanwhile, the teachers get difficulty to be able to control the child one by
one whether they have understood the lesson or not. It happens because the time available is limited, the number of the students is 35-40 children and
sometimes the students do not have the bravery to express the questions. That is why it needs a method of teaching to make the students interact, collaborate,
assist and discuss with each other to solve the problems. The fact that the teaching method is still dominated by traditional
system arises some serious problems. Most students could not relate what they have learnt with the knowledge in recent and future life. It means that learning
was not meaningful for students to solve the problems occurring in their lives. Learning had not been able to develop language knowledge, language skills,
and language competence comprehensively. It happened because the teaching and learning process did not correlate the materials with the students’ daily
life, was not contextual, gave more abilities to memorize, but not to think creatively, critically, and analytically.
Therefore, the researcher is interested in conducting an experimental study by proposing a method of teaching reading comprehension, namely
contextual teaching and learning CTL. This approach assumes that learning
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4 process would be actually occurring if the students could find meaningful
correlation between abstract thinking and practical application in the real context. In such learning experience, facts, concepts, principles and
procedures as subject materials that are internalized through discovery, reinforcement, interrelationship, and integrated processes. Contextual learning
is coordination between subject materials or content and intellectual skills that should be possessed by the students in a situation which is suitable with the
students’ cognitive psychology and environmental needs http:coe.ssusb.edu scarcellahelp.pdf
Furthermore, Johnson 2005: 25 describes contextual teaching learning as an educational process that aims to help students see meaning in the
academic material they are studying by connecting academic subjects with the context of their daily lives, that is, with context of their personal, social, and
cultural circumstance. To achieve their aims, the system encompasses the following eight components: making meaningful connections, doing
significant work, self-regulated learning, and collaborating, critical and creative thinking, nurturing the individual, reaching high standards, and using
authentic assessment. Besides the teaching method, other factors which may influence the
effectiveness of students’ learning are external factors and internal factors. External factors can be classified into two groups: social and non-social
factors. Social factors usually come from the students themselves and non- social factors can be the place, the weather, and the time when the learning
process happens. Internal factors can also be classified into two groups. They
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5 are physiological factors and psychological factors. The physiological factors
include the function of certain organs that students have. The psychological factors cover students’ intelligence, motivation, and interest.
Intelligence is an important determinant of reading. Reading is a process of thinking. Intelligence is the ability to learn and to apply what has
been learned. A measure of verbal intelligence was significantly more strongly correlated with the rate of reading, single- word reading, vocabulary or word
knowledge, and understanding of what was read in a text Sue, et al., 2009: 2 Considering the characteristics of contextual teaching and learning
method and the intelligence, thus there is an expectation that this learning method will be able to give a positive contribution towards English teaching
and learning particularly in improving students’ reading comprehension. In order to be more convinced whether this research works well, the writer tends
to compare the result of students’ reading comprehension achievement between the control class taught using grammar translation method GTM
and the experimental class taught by using CTL viewed from their intelligence.
B. Identification of the Problems