CHAPTER 1
INTRODUCTION
A.
Background
The scope of English teaching in Indonesia based on
the curriculum include four skills, i.e. reading, listening, speaking, and
writing, and the mastering of English both as receptive and productive skills
becomes very important, particularly in international communication. Writing is
one of the productive skills. It is also one of the four language skills.
Many people in a variety of occupation are involved
in activities requiring to write both formally and informally, writing is very
important in communication with other people in the society. Rubin in Kartini
(2001:1) said that writing is essential to many aspects of social, practical,
and proffesional communication. Research reports, academic papers, or business
report must be all in written form, in line with Rubin in Pincas in Kartini (2001)
pointed out that writing is used to express our feeling and opinions. Writing
is a means of both communication and self expression. From the statements, we
can say that writing is the key communicating knowledge and expressing ideas,
it is a primary medium for creation and the strange of thought. Therefore, writing
is one of the four language skils that are taught in learning English which
usually considered as a difficult activity to do for English students.
Occasionally, the English students seemed very
confused when they have to start to write. Moreover, most of them cannot write,
at least at the first time. This is, of course, caused by some possible
factors. The students’ confusion may come if they do not have any ideas, or
they could not arrange the vocabulary into good sentences. Even, most English
students having no corage to write probably because they are unclear about
puntuation.
Beside that,
most teachers of English often think that the students’ difficulties in writing
in English as a foreign language are due to their weakness in grammar and
vocabulary. These as tone as stated by Lewwit (1990:2) that pity the EFL
learner in his or her first composition course: virtually no experience, may be
no ideas, a slender vocabulary, skewed grammar, and probably the vaguest notion
of punctuation.
Making a qualifying writing is not easy thing to do, indeed. It has its own procedures and
convention that should be obeyed. Consequently a writer ought to apprehend those
convention, such as when the capital letters are used, when the comma, the full
stop, the question mark, and the other puntuations are used or not used.
Students of English also should have sufficient knowledge about tenses, the use
of verbs, adjectives, modals, and so on.
Furthemore, to obtain a good writing with good
quality needs some steps or process. One of them is editing. In this steps, we
are ready to edit our writing for grammatical and mechanical accuracy in
preparation for making the final copy. It is, therefore, said that writing
activity certainly takes long time and much energy, because we have to see
again and again which eventually leads to a finish composition. Surely, this
will bring students into boredom and be discourage to write.
Taking account of those problems, we need to think to
find out any solution to run out the problems or at least help both students
and teachers to make writing class more effective. Nowadays, there have been a
lots of medias provided to assist the proces
of
teaching and learning of language.
Recently by the end of 2000, Toni Buzan’s idea on
how to think creatively and critically has been introduced in the Internet
Journal. The idea called “mind mapping”
is employed in note-taking and thought-organizing method by combining right and
left brain learning methods to improve memory, comprehension, and creative
thinking (Jauhari, 1999).
Mapping is a virtual method of organizing
information, which involves drawing diagrams to show how ideas in a writing are
related. In mind-mapping method, a note taker employs the left side of brain to
do mapping by writing key ideas, and building outward with a series of
interconnecting lines and other related ideas, and the right side of the brain
to highlight broad cohesive concept with colors. This method is a trademark of
Buzan that has been proved by the Bosley group from E-commerce to be very
useful not only for engineers but also for all level of society and all fields
of work.
Since writing ability is the interaction between
thought and language and the process of writing undoubtedly involves brain. it
is possible to apply the mind mapping-method to improve the writing ability.
This possibility had motivated the writer to conduct a research under the title “Improving the Students’ Writing Ability of
the First Year Students of SMA Negeri 10 Makassar Through Mind Mapping Method”
B.
Problem
Statement
The
problem will be investigated in this research is formulated as follows:
“Is the mind-mapping method effective in improving
the students’ writing ability of the first year students of SMA Negeri 10
Makassar?”
C.
Objective
of the Reserach
The objective of this research is to find out whether
or not the mind mapping is effective in improving the students’ writing ability
of the first year students of SMA Negeri 10 Makassar.
D. Significance of the Research
The result of this research is expected to be useful
information for students in order that
to motivate them to write by using mind mapping method. Therefore, they can develop
their ability in writing, and also hoped to be fruitful information for teachers
in improving the quality of the way their teach, especially in teaching the
writing subject. and hopefully bring meaningful contribution to the people who
concern about writing, where it will be the input in the term of method of
generating ideas, and build up their ideas into piece of writing, So that, they
can develop their ability in writing.
E.
Scope
of the Research
By discipline, this research is under applied
linguistics because writing needs more practice. The scope of this research is
restricted to the effectiveness of the mind mapping method in improving the
students’ writing ability of the first year students of SMA Negeri 10 Makassar.
The mind mapping method is a prewriting activity that can help the teacher to
present materials, to make lesson plan, to produce handout related to the
writing descriptive and narrative paragraph. The activities given to the
students were asking them to make mind mapping
and they try to find the related words and then make it into coherent
parargraph . This activity will also enable the students to generate main idea,
and supporting idea in a coherent paragraph. In writing paragraph by using mind
mapping method, it will be concerned to the students writing ability to five
components of writing, they are content organization, vocabulary, language use
or grammar, and mechanics.
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