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 : 

SKRIPSI THE USE OF MIND MAPPING TECHNIQUE IN TEACHING RECOUNT TEXT TO IMPROVE STUDENTS READING COMPREHENSION ABILITY

(KODE : PENDBING-0048) : SKRIPSI THE USE OF MIND MAPPING TECHNIQUE IN TEACHING RECOUNT TEXT TO IMPROVE STUDENTS READING COMPREHENSION ABILITY

CHAPTER I 

INTRODUCTION

This chapter contains a brief explanation of the introduction. It consists of background, research questions, the scope of the research, aims of the research, hypothesis, research methodology, clarification of key terms, and organization of the paper. 

A. Background

In the structure of curriculum program in Junior high school, English is one of the most important subjects for students in the seventh grade until nine grades by having about four hours lesson every week. English has been identified as the most important parameter in the curriculum development that should be mastered by Indonesian students. It means that students in the junior high school have three years opportunity to learn English and they are expected to master it.

There are four skills in English teaching that the students should master it. The four skills are listening, speaking, reading, and writing. Standard competence of Junior High School states that the seventh grade students in the second semester should be able to express spoken text and short monologue in descriptive and procedure text to interact with surrounding. It means that, the seventh grade students should be able to express meaning in simple short monologue and dialogue used in oral language variety accurately, fluently, and understandably to interact with surrounding.

Speaking is the productive skill in the oral mode. It consists of producing systematic verbal utterance to convey meaning. Speaking also is an important skills to communicate because in speaking students convey ideas, opinion, etc. According to Brown (2001) speaking is one of the important skills in language learning in the classroom. It is used twice as often as listening and the most used skill, it means that students should be good in speaking because speaking is used more than listening.

However in reality, since English is introduced to students, they cannot talk fluently it can be seen when they make small conversations they cannot talk as the teacher want and they get some difficulties to speak English. They feel uneasy and they are afraid to speak with each other to share about their opinion. It can be drawn from their negative attitude toward speaking activity, one of the reason is the teaching method which is used is boring.

In teaching and learning process, the effective and interesting method is one of the ways to motivate students to be involved in the activity. It can make the students feel more comfortable with the materials. As Dewey states, cited in Mooney (2000; p. 15), that enjoyable teaching learning process will occur when students are interested in the materials because the beginner students are interested in many new things such as foreign language. According to Brown (2001 : 100) the characteristic of novice level is the students' ability to communicate using learned material and oral production consists of isolated words.

Unfortunately many teachers still apply traditional method in teaching. For example, teachers make the students keep learning English through teachers' explanation of new words or grammar. In fact, this method is not effective because students will easily forget the words and the material if they learn different topic. Especially for students, those who are seven to twelve years old, this method is uninteresting. Keskil and Cephe note that students who are 10 and 11 years old like game, puzzles and song most, those who are 12 and 13 years old like activities built around dialogues, question-answer activities and matching exercises most. (Harmer, 2001 : 61).

There are many methods that can be used in teaching or learning speaking. But the applied methods which are used need to be not only interesting but also effective in teaching speaking. Clearly, students will not be able to speak foreign language well just by memorizing lists of words, repeating mechanically some useful expressions, and so on. Cameron's (2001) state that speaking is the active use of language to express meanings. To speak in the foreign language in order to share understandings with other, people require attention to precise details of the language. Thus, if students do not understand the spoken language, they cannot learn it effectively.

As Dawson (1975) state that speaking is truly basic skill in language learning. Students need to get themselves involved in the classroom to get more practice in speaking foreign language. For the purpose of getting students involved in the classroom, enjoyable activities are recommended to be used by the teachers to make the students focus on teaching learning process.

The teachers have to use different kinds of teaching approach in order not to make the students feel bored. Klancar (2006 : 53) states that the teacher will get some advantages when they teach student by various types of activities such as reading aloud and describing pictures.

Speaking activity can be modified by using media to help students in organizing their idea, for example by using pictures. Based on the basic competence designed for seventh grade in the junior high school, students are expected to be able to describe something such as objects, things people or procedure. It means that teachers have to help them to be able to describe it. There are many ways to make students more involved in the activity one of them is by using pictures. Besides using pictures and posters teacher can also use the real media such as desks, chairs, and the other things to help them to describe people, things or object. Pictures, as the media, are expected to give explanation and description, without having the students to memorize the text.

Pictures can be a media to stimulate students in describing an object or person in the pictures. Students can acquire the meaning by seeing the things in the pictures without explanation. It also helps them to communicate or explain the events in the picture. As Thornbury (2005; p. 75) explains that the script of conversation can be illustrated in picture form to make it memorized easily. So that teachers can create joyful learning through pictures that can affect students to participate and also motivate them to be active in the class. Providing tools especially pictures could encourage students to focus on the materials. They are interested in the pictures and become actively participate in the class. Furthermore, through pictures, fun learning can be created and speaking activity will not be seen as difficult as students might have thought.

In relation to the teaching and learning, pictures are potential source in the transferring information. In the other words, picture can become a bridge to transfer knowledge from the teacher to the student. As Goodman (2006 : 75) states, that picture can act as a bridge between students who have different learning style. According to Canning-Wilson (2001 : 91) pictures are important since they facilitate students understanding. Furthermore, she explains that for most people, the mental image of what they see has greater impact than auditory input.

Based on the explanation above, this research aimed is to find out the effectiveness of using pictures in teaching speaking English. Thus, the entitled "TEACHING SPEAKING ENGLISH THROUGH PICTURE IN IMPROVING STUDENTS SPEAKING ABILITY".

B. Research Questions

According to the previous explanations, this research was intended to answer the following questions : 

1. Is the use of Pictures effective in improving students speaking ability ?

2. What are the students' responses of teaching speaking English through pictures ?

C. The Scope of the Research

Based on the aforementioned problems, the scope of this study was to find out the effectiveness of picture in teaching speaking English. The context of the study was limited on teaching speaking English, especially to the seventh grades of SMP X.

D. Aims of the Research

The aims of this research are : 

1. To investigate the effectiveness of picture in teaching speaking English through picture.

2. To analyzed students' responses towards the implementation teaching speaking English through picture.