THE USE OF SMALL GROUP DISCUSSION IN TEACHING WRITTEN PROCEDURE TEXT

CHAPTER I

INTRODUCTION

 1.1  Background of the Study

Language as a means of communication is used among human beings in order to establish social relation. Language is a system of sounds and words used by humans to express their thought and feeling. By using a language, people are able to convey their message to express their ideas in oral, written or sign language, so that they can cooperate and get along with each other. Generally, people in a community understand and speak their language well enough to carry out every activity.

English as one of international language has become lingua franca, even though it is not the language with the largest members of native or ‘first’ language speakers. Here, a lingua franca can be defined as language widely adopted for communication between two speakers whose native language are different from each other’s and where one or both speakers are using it as  a ‘second’ language (Harmer, 2001:5).

English as an international language is spoken in most international events and is used as the medium of information flow on science, technology and culture. English is also as a part of our national education. It has important roles in intellectual, social and emotional students and as an important key to be success in learning all lessons. 

In order to make English teaching-learning process is successful, Indonesia has applied many kinds of  curriculum. Nowadays, the  government has arranged the 2006 School-Based Curriculum named Kurikulum Tingkat Satuan Pendidikan (KTSP). School-Based Curriculum is the development of the Competence Based Curriculum (CBC). Both of them have the same purpose of developing the skills of understanding and producing various short functional and monologue texts, and essay in the form of narrative, descriptive, recount, procedure, report, news item, and the hortatory exposition texts. 

English has been taught for a long time, it does not mean that result of teaching in our schools is satisfactory. (Ramelan 1992:3) states that: Most SMU graduates are still very poor in their reading comprehension, since they can not usually read or understand articles in English dailies magazines, which are now in circulation here; let alone their ability in writing, which has mostly been over looked in our schools. In speaking skills is another linguistics skill of our students which is least develop.  

Looking at the above quotation we find that besides reading and speaking, writing is one of the four skills in which the students failed to master. \The unsatisfactory result of English teaching is not simply because of the \students themselves or the teachers. There are other factors which affect the final result of teaching such as time allotment, the use of visual aids, methodology, teaching material, and other facilities (Ramelan 1992:3-4). All factors mentioned above work together in affecting the final result of teaching or in other words, the success or the failure of the English teaching depends on the factors involved in it.

There are four language skills (listening, speaking, reading and writing) that people should develop in order to  master English. In this study, writing is more emphasized than others. As one of the language skills, writing is an important medium to express ideas. Heaton (1975:138) states that writing skill is complex and difficult to teach, requiring mastery not only of grammatical and rhetorical device but also of conceptual and judgement. Based on the statement above, English teachers should have some variations in teaching writing. Writing is one of the ways to improve students’ ability in expressing their ideas, stories and memories into written form.

There are many writing texts, such as descriptive text, narrative text, report text, procedure text, etc. In this study, the writer will discuss about procedure text. Anderson et. al (1997:50) state that a procedure text is a piece of text that gives us instruction for doing something. The purpose of the procedure text is to explain how to do, make or play something. Gerot, et al. (1994:86) state that social function of procedure text is to describe how something is accomplished through a sequence of actions or steps.

Procedure text is a kind of text  types included in School – Based  Curriculum for Senior High School students.  Procedure text is  very important to be learned because first, it is a kind of text types included in School – Based Curriculum for senior high school students especially in year ten. Second, it is a daily needs. Students will find many written procedure text such as??? ???????????????????????