SKRIPSI PTK THE USE OF PICTURE SERIES TO HELP THE STUDENTS WRITE A RECOUNT TEXT

(KODE : PTK-0712) : SKRIPSI PTK THE USE OF PICTURE SERIES TO HELP THE STUDENTS WRITE A RECOUNT TEXT (MAPEL BAHASA INGGRIS KELAS X)

CHAPTER I 

INTRODUCTION

A. Background of the Study

English is well-known as a global language used by people to communicate with other people around the world. If someone does not know English, he will get difficulties in having communication with other people that use English. Therefore, mastering English language is very important.

The fact that mastering English is very important becomes the background for the government of Indonesia to put English in the formal education curriculum. The government of Indonesia has put English as a compulsory subject since the fourth grade of elementary school. It is expected that every student will be able to master English so the student does not find any obstacles dealing with language when the student is having communication with other people from around the world.

Feez (1998) argues that enabling learners to develop the knowledge and skills which will allow them to engage with whole texts appropriate to social context is the aim of English language teaching. Because of that, the government of Indonesia is implementing the School Based Curriculum which focuses on texts both in junior and senior high school levels. In the curriculum, senior high school students are obliged to learn English through different texts which have different function based on social context. Therefore, the syllabus used in the learning and teaching activities is text-based syllabus. The genre-based approach is one example of approaches used in text-based syllabus (Feez, 1998). Some texts to be taught in senior high schools are recount, narrative, procedure, descriptive, news item, report, analytical exposition, spoof, hortatory exposition, explanation, discussion, and review (BSNP, 2006).

Those texts should be learned by the students in all language skills which are listening, speaking, reading, and writing. However, each student has different types of difficulties related to those four skills. Some of them consider writing as the most difficult skill to be learnt. Tiedt (1989 : 6) states that "of all the language skills, writing is the most difficult and it is a hard work." As with speaking, the writer generates ideas. On the other hand, writing is important to be mastered to express ideas without the pressure of face-to-face communication (Raimes, 1983). 

Unfortunately, based on the researcher's experience and observation when he was doing his Program Pengalaman Lapangan (PPL), many English teachers usually do not give equal portion of teaching to the four language skills when they are teaching the students. Many English teachers usually assign the students to write a text at home and then they submit their writing in the following meeting. The teachers do not understand that writing has to be done after several stages of writing starting from brain-storming until final draft of writing. They even do not give any feedback on the students' writing so that the students cannot know whether their writing is good or not. It can be the obstacle for the students to improve their writing skills.

The students in SMAN X also considered writing as the most difficult skill to learn. The researcher asked the students to write down their simple opinion towards writing on the back side of their drafts while the researcher taught the students. From the data, there were more than 50% students who stated that writing is difficult. They found a lot of difficulties in writing. Based on the researcher's observation, the students had problem in writing a recount text. They needed much time to start writing because they did not have any idea to write and they had very limited English vocabulary. Besides, the result of the students' recount texts was not really satisfying. Their ideas were not organized well. They also made mistakes mostly on the use of past tense, minimum requirements, and even some of them did not write proper recount text based on the generic structure of a recount text. It was so ironic since recount is one of the texts that have more value in the context of schooling (Gerot and Wignell, 1994) as cited by Mulya (2007 : 17). Feez (1998) adds that recount is classified as the simplest story text.

The reasons motivated the researcher to conduct a classroom action research to help the students write a recount text. Besides, the researcher, who considers that writing is not really difficult, wants to help the students in that class write a recount text so that they will not think that writing is difficult anymore.

The research offered a solution in the form of instructional media to overcome the problem faced by the students by using picture series. Picture series were chosen because they have many advantages. Using what appears in the pictures, the students can get ideas and opportunity to write in a connected way (Kreidle, 1968). It will help the students write a text without spending much time only to find ideas. Well-chosen picture series also give motivation to the students in learning situation, especially in learning how to write (Kieffer and Cochran, 1985). Besides, picture series provide material that offers guidance on vocabulary, sentence structure, and organization yet lets the students write about new subject matter (Raimes, 1983).

Some previous research dealing with the use of picture series in teaching writing showed good results. One of them was done by Setiawaty in 2003. Setiawaty used the picture series to help her students write a narrative text. Based on Setiawaty's research, the use of picture series helped her students write a narrative text. Understanding the advantages provided by picture series and also the problems in writing a recount text faced by the students, the use of picture series can be a good solution in the form instruction media for the students in this research in writing a recount text.

SKRIPSI PTK THE USE OF MIND MAPPING STRATEGY TO IMPROVE STUDENTS ABILITY IN WRITING PROCEDURE TEXT

(KODE : PTK-0571) : SKRIPSI PTK THE USE OF MIND MAPPING STRATEGY TO IMPROVE STUDENTS ABILITY IN WRITING PROCEDURE TEXT (BAHASA INGGRIS KELAS X)

CHAPTER II 

REVIEW OF RELATED LITERATURE

A. Review of Previous Study

In this subchapter, I would like to review some previous studies that support my view about the use of mind mapping strategy to improve students' ability in writing procedure text.

First, a study done by Mawadah (2009), She found that the teaching descriptive text to junior high school students of SMP Negeri 1 Pegandon by using mind mapping strategy was more effective than teaching descriptive text using conventional strategy. This experimental research used two classes as the sample of the research. The experimental group was taught by using mind mapping strategy and the control group was taught by using conventional strategy. The main purpose of the activities above is to make students easier in constructing a text.

Second, Sofyani Tyas Utami (2009) also did research about the use of prewriting strategies : Brainstorming and Mind Mapping in Essay Writing for tenth grade students of SMA Negeri 3 Salatiga. The use of brainstorming and mind mapping can help and motivate students to generate ideas and practice expressing thought in written form, so that it would be helpful for students in creating a text and get a satisfying work in writing. The students' achievement in writing recount text increased from the first meeting to the last meeting. The students' respond that were obtained through questionnaire showed that most of them agreed that using brainstorming and mind mapping could help them in improving their ability in writing recount text.

Third, Susanto (2008) gave description of determining the application of mind mapping method in teaching descriptive writing for the second grade students of SMU Negeri 1 Kajen. He found some advantages by applying mind mapping method in teaching descriptive text. First, the students are interested and motivated in exploring their ideas and imagination using mind mapping method since they found new things during learning process. Second, they might be encouraged to be active in classroom activity by asking the teacher or friends. Then, the last advantage is its simplicity to use mind mapping method by making a chart like a tree diagrams. The students understand, memorize and remember the main idea and relative words easily.

The writer knew that every method has its advantages and weaknesses. The first weakness in applying mind mapping method is that writer must have broad knowledge especially in vocabularies and diction (choice of words). The students liked to ask English translation the difficult words related to the topic. They should bring a dictionary to help them in translating words because it would spend more times if they asked to the teacher continuously. The second one is that spends more paper sheets to do the test because they do two steps before they make the final draft of the descriptive text. The advantage in applying mind mapping method is the students can automatically enrich their vocabularies by searching branches and related ideas from the main topic.

B. Review of Theoretical Background

1. Language Skill

It has been described in the background of the study that language competence is actually important to be achieved by everyone. Listening, reading, speaking and writing are the four basic skills of language that students should learn in order to be able to communicate as well. A good language teaching is absolutely important especially in delivering materials of those four skills. Most of us know that there are various teaching strategies or methods that have been found and implemented to develop students' mastery of those four basic skills due to the importance of each skill for the students' future life.

2. Writing Skill

Nowadays we can see that writing is one of the four basic skills of language which has an important role in many aspects of life. Using writing we can learn lot of things from the simplest thing until a complex one. If we have ideas, desires and everything to explain, writing can be used as an instrument that makes somebody else understand what we want to explain. In short, we can say that writing pays an important role in our life.

Hammer (2004 : 3) states that "being able to write is a vital skill for 'speaker' of a foreign language as much as for everyone using their own first language". In line with Hammer's opinion, Ramelan (1994 : 11) states that "writing is very important as a part of man's culture because it can be used to preserve thought, ideas, and also speech sound". White (1980 : 8) suggests three points about the importance of writing. They are : (1) the linguists become interested in studying the characteristics of written language as well as spoken language, (2) teachers of English become increasingly concerned with the need to teach writing to students of science and technology, for whom ability to use the spoken language might be secondary or even irrelevance, (3) coinciding with the increased interest in written language by both linguists and English teachers had been a considerable growth in the study of language beyond the sentences, that was on discourse. From those statements we can draw a conclusion that everybody should have a good writing ability because of its importance for the time being and their future life.

According to Meyers (2005 : 1), "the word writing coming from a verb. Writing is a way to produce language, which you do naturally when you speak. You say something, think of more you say, perhaps correct something you have said and than move on to the next statement". Writing is much different, except that you take more time to think about your subject, the person you'll be discussing it with and last but not least the purpose that you want to achieve in that discussion.

Therefore, if you are writing a second language, you'll be revising your work continuously. You have to pay more attention to your diction (choice of word), form and grammar to make sure that they clearly express what you exactly want to say.

We know that writing skill is always used in most of examinations done at school from elementary up to university level. The importance of writing skill is obviously seen as something that must be emphasized because in daily communication language is not only spoken but also written. The different characteristics between spoken and written language are stated by Harmer (2004 : 6-11), as follows :