CHAPTER I
INTRODUCTION
A. Background of the Study
English as one of the subjects in schools has an important role because English is a foreign language, an international language which is widely used in communication by people in most countries in the world. Furthermore, English is often used in writing science books, journals, or articles about knowledge and technology. Therefore, in order to able to develop science, knowledge, and technology, and to communicate with people from other countries, English is taught in Indonesia as a foreign language from junior high schools until universities.
English is taught at schools in order that students are able to master the four skills, they are listening, speaking, reading and writing. Harmer (2007: 265) states as follows”we use language in terms of four skills- reading, writing, speaking and listening. These are often divided into two types. Receptive skills is a term used for reading and listening, skills where meaning is extracted from discourse. Productive skills is the term for speaking and writing, skills where students actually have to produce language themselves.” Among those four skills, writing is the most difficult skill to learn and to master, because writing is an active or productive skill so that students who are learning writing have to learn how to find ideas, and express them into writing. Richards and Renandya (2002:30) state that “There is no doubt that writing is the most difficult skill for L2 learners to master. The difficulty lies not only in generating and organizing ideas, but also in translating these ideas into readable texts.”
According to the basic competence in junior high school curriculum, in learning writing, students are expected to write some texts for example letters, short messages, greeting cards, monologs such as descriptive, recount, narrative, procedure and report texts. To produce those writing products, especially monologs, students have to follow the writing steps. Seow (2002:316) states as follows:“ Process writing as a classroom activity incorporates the four basic writing stages – planning, drafting (writing), revising (redrafting), and editing – and three other stages externally imposed on students by the teacher, namely responding (sharing), evaluating and post-writing. Teachers often plan appropriate classroom activities that support the learning of specific writing skills at every stage. “
Writing is very difficult to master. In the lights of the statement, we should, as foreign language teachers, be able to makecertain assumptions, subject of course to cultural variations and to avoid making others. In reality, students’ writing ability is very low. Based on teaching experience during Field Practice Programme (Programme Pengalaman Terpadu: PPLT) in SMP N 1 Batang Kuis, the students could not write well. It caused by some factors. First, the students are lazy to write because they do not have enough vocabulary, ideas and fact to write. Second, the students are lack of knowledge about the topic that they should write. Third, the students cannot organize their idea into good paragraph well.
In fact, students of SMP especially seventh grade students hardly ever follow the writing stages in their writings. They often copied texts from the students who were good at English subject. Sometimes they just rearranged jumble sentences given by the teacher or taken from the textbooks. Students did not have any ideas to write. In other words, they had blank minds when they were asked to write a text, for a descriptive text.
In the second years of junior high school, the basic competency that should be achieved in the writing English subject is that the students have ability to develop and produce written simple functional text in the descriptive text, recount text, and narrative text.
Descriptive text in one of functional texts which is difficult enough to be learnt by the students. Descriptive text is a text that describes the features of someone, something, or a certain place. Descriptive text consists of introduction and description. Introduction is the part of paragraph that introduces the character, and description is the part of paragraph that describes the character. The students can use the simple present and adjective clause in writing descriptive text. In writing the descriptive text, students often find some difficulties. The students usually feel difficult to organize their ideas. Furthermore, many students made some mistakes and faced difficulties to build and develop their imagination.
Based on the statement above, teachers must be able to organize learning teaching activities. They have to master the materials, methods and also technique or strategy to make the students understand and apply descriptive writing matters in practice. A good technique can help the students in comprehending and mastering the lesson. One of the teaching failures is caused by an unsuitable method or technique in teaching-learning process. There are a lot of methods and techniques to get the English teaching effectively.
Based on the situation, the researcher thinks that it is very important to find ways to overcome the problem. One of the ways to solve the problem is by proposing a teaching model that suitable, effective, easy, interesting and helpful to the students. One of ways is to try a method that is Quantum Learning. The researcher hopes by using this method, the students can make it easier to write what should write in descriptive text. This method is expected can help the students to make a descriptive text. The researcher wants to try to further explore how to improve student achievement motivation. To continue this experiment, the teacher must have the ability to choose and use appropriate teaching methods and according with certain subject and level of student ability. One method that can be applied is quantum learning to get comfortable and fun learning.
Quantum learning provides tips, hints, strategies and time-saving process, sharpen understanding and memory and make fun learning and rewarding. In addition, quantum learning is an appropriate method of learning, effective and can improve self-ability and self-motivation to become better and eager in learning.
Based on the reasons stated above, the writer takes a title “Improving the Students’ Writing Skills on Descriptive Text through Quantum Learning Method”.
B. Identification of the Problem
The problems of this research were identified as follow:
1. The students don’t know what they should write and what tenses they should use to write about descriptive text. (lacked vocabularies, had a lot of mistakes of spelling and choice of words)
2. Students have no idea to make an essay. So they do not know what to do for the first time.
3. The teacher still uses lecture method.
C. The Scope and Limitation
Based on the identification of the problem, the scope was focused on writing and it was limited on writing descriptive text.
D. Formulation of the Problem
The formulation of this study was formulated as is there any improvement of students’ writing skill through Quantum Learning Method?
E. Objective of the Study
The objective of this research was tofind out the improvement of students’ writing skills through Quantum Learning Method. Klik to Download
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