The Students' Mastery of Simple Present Tense

CHAPTER I

INTRODUCTION

A. Background

Many students who learn English can not use it for oral communication because they do not master English well, mainly structure and vocabulary. Wilkins (1978) in Bachtiar (1999) states that without having adequate vocabulary students will not develop their ability to communicate even his communication is difficult to convey messages.

Simple present mastery is one of the ways to know how far students understood about grammar. Realizing the importance of simple present mastery building for the students, teachers must take an effort to build up their students' mastery.

Simple present mastery is the most important factor in compiling simple sentences to express daily activities or habits. By this research, we can know how far students ability in making sentence, so that they do not find difficulties if given tests.

Many research and analyses need to be done. We need to know details about the nature of authentic materials and activities that are appropriate for learners at different stages of language acquisition. We need to know more about the details of the "grammar clusters"--those grammatical structures that generally occur together in a particular type of communication. For example, narratives often cluster together (1) past tense verbs, (2) proper nouns, (3) first and third person pronouns, and (4) adverbs of time and place   Byrd, P. and Reid, J. (1998).

            By using  test from competence books, most students in town and also in the country can answer correctly or incorrectly, because this book have been used the round of at all points. Through  this book , they learn about grammar, vocabulary, listening, and etc, but in this case, all of the lessons are important but most all important that are dominated of word structure.

            I tell this because word structure represent the start from the word, although students have knocked by heart a lot of words but they do not know how its wording automatically they can not use it, and this very having an effect to all subject. In doing this research, I use test from curriculum competence book have interest which passed by the second year all first students’. Through this test we can get the data about student ability which one can understand about word structure, and which one can not understand. From the data, we can compare between wiliest student and school which have best quality.

            The significant of this research to increase the students’ learning method through test, which has been analyzed showing students ability in studying English more lower and need to be developed so that each teacher who teach in the class, have good teaching and can increase their teaching method. All teachers teaching in class can improve the way of teaching and we can tighten the relation between teaching and testing because both each other interconnected.

My target do this research is that all students of the the second year students, can understand about grammar, so that they can make the sentence truly and this can support the students to be able to develop their creation like make short story, writing free composition, and can become the marked writer. Passing all these test, the students can improve their English language lesson, so that get motivation to learn the English language and does not stiff if continuing in college.

            The major problem of this research is most of the students have low achievement in English. In second year students are not very familiar with structure particularly the simple present tense. Based on this, one research question can be formulated as follows:

To what extent can the students master the simple present tense?

C. The objectives of the research.

            The aim of this research is concerning with the students mastery of simple present tense.  

To find out the students mastery of simple present tense.

D. The significance of the research.

            The findings resulted from this research are expected to be useful and meaningful reference and information for teachers who teach English at Junior high school, and the students who learn English as a second year students especially in the simple present mastery.

E. The scope of the research

            By discipline, this study is under applied linguistic The research was conducted at SMPN in Bantaeng, there were : SMPN 1 Bantaeng, SMPN 2 Bantaeng, SMPN 3 Bantaeng, in each school one class was taken as sample that concerns with their ability to master simple present tense that was traced through test based on the competence based curriculum.