PTK BAHASA INGGRIS

CHAPTER I

INTRODUCTION

A.   The background of study

In English language, there are four skills to be mastered. They are listening, speaking, reading, writing. Writing is one of the four language skills which is very important to learnt. As it know, writing is not easy. Among the skills, writing is the most difficult skill to be learnt, because it needs hard thinking in producing words,sentences, and paragraph at the same time.

As Jack C. Richard and Willy  A. Renandya (1986:1) said, “writing is the most difficult skill for second language learners to mastered. The difficulty lies not only in generating and organizing ideas, but also in translating these ideas into readable 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 is one of the essay texts which is difficult enough to be learnt by the students. Descriptive text is a text that describes the feature 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 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 mistake  and faces difficulties to build and develop their imagination.

Base on the statement above, teachers must be able to organize learning – teaching activities. They have to master the material, method also 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 failure is caused by an unsuitable method or technique in teaching – learning process, the writer would like to propose an alternative technique, that is the one which common known under the term “Clustering Technique”. Clustering Technique is a good way to turn a broad subject into a limited and more manageable topic for a short essay. According to John Langan (2001:25), clustering technique also known as diagramming or mapping, is another strategy that can be used to generate material for a paper. This method is helpful for people who like think in a visual way. In clustering, you use lines, boxes, and circle to show relationship among the ideas and details that occur to you.”

Moreover, the clustering technique can motivate the students to write and to stimulus their ideas. Besides that, this technique will help the students to organize their thinking before they develop in a paragraph.

Basd on the  writer’s experience when he did the observation on SMPN 19 Makassar, the process of teaching – learning in the classroom was still passive. The students did not understand clearly about descriptive text, how to identify the descriptive text, and how to describe persons, places, and things in English writing. Besides that, the teacher used one technique in teaching descriptive text  which makes the students felt bored and difficult to understand the material when teaching – learning. Therefore, the teacher needed to be more creative in teaching, including the use of technique.

In teaching learning process of decriptive text the teacher was still active so that the students didn’t have chance to express their idea to make descriptive text. Besides that the teacher seldom gave students the vocabulary and explained the phrase which focus on descriptive text so that the students were difficult to organize their vocabulary to be a good paragraph.

The teacher’s strategy in teaching descriptive text was not detail so that students felt difficult to understand descriptive text more detail and there was not the key words which must be understood by students, because the teacher only focused on evaluation of the descriptive text than made students understand about descriptive text.

Base on the background above, the writer took a title of this “skripsi” “Improving Students’ Ability in Writing Descriptive Text Using Clustering Technique at Eighth grade of SMPN 19 Makassar”.

              

B.   The Statement of Problem

Base on the background presented above, the writer planned to use clustering technique in teaching writing of descriptive text at the eighth grade of students of SMPN 19 Makassar. The general question of this research was “how can the use of clustering technique improve students’ ability in writing descriptive text?”

C.   The Scope  of Study

 The writer only focused on eighth grade of students SMPN 19 Makassar at the first semester 2012/2013 academic year, and the problem of this study was be limited in the implementation of using clustering technique in teaching descriptive text.

D.   The Object of Study

From the previous discussion in the background of the study, the objectives of this study was as follows :

1.    To improve the students’ ability in writing descriptive text  using clustering technique.

2.    To add students’ insight in writing descriptive text using clustering technique.

E.   The significant of Study

The result of this study can provide useful information for :

1.    To the teachers

The result of this study was useful for English teachers at Junior High School level to get information about teaching descriptive writing using clustering technique.

2.    To the students

The result of this study gave an input to the students to improve their ability in writing.

3.    To the readers

The result of this study can add insight or reference about descriptive text teaching.

4.    To the other researchers

For further researchers who was interested in teaching descriptive writing at junior high school level can get the basic information from this study to do the further research.