IMPROVE DESCRIPTIVE PARAGRAPH WRITING
ABILITY THROUGH PICTURE SERIES OF THE SEVENTH GRADE STUDENTS OF SMPN
CHAPTER I
INTRODUCTION
1.1 Background of the Study
Writing that is
one of the parts of four language skills is very important to learn because it
can express the idea through written form of knowledge. Fulwiler (2002:16)
states that writing is never effortless thing because it is a messy,
unpredictable and amazing process as the writer will be a little less hard on
themselves when it doesn’t come out just right the first time. It means that
expressing the idea in the written form is not an easy thing to do.
Writing is
complex activity. Broughton et al. (2003:116) state that writing is no longer
seen simply as a way of recording thoughts, feeling and the idea after the
fact, but also as a key means of generating and exploring new thoughts and
ideas. Teaching writing must be well planned by the English teachers in order
to make the students easily understand how to write a good writing. According
of the school based curriculum for junior high school, one should be
achieved in writing skill for the seventh grade students is the ability of
constructing a good descriptive paragraph which consists of two parts such as
identification and description about specific object.
When the
researcher did the preliminary observation by doing an initial interview with
the English teacher of the seventh grade students in the target school, he
found that it was really difficult for the students to write a good descriptive
paragraph although the materials had been given by using a conventional
technique previously. In fact, many students frequently have problem in
writing. It can be seen from the result of a preliminary research conducted by
researcher when teaching practice at SMPN 3 Gianyar. The interviewed teacher
admitted that she had tried to use technique of demonstration to teach
descriptive paragraph; however, the students still had difficulties in
constructing a good descriptive paragraph.
Regarding the
students’ problem above, the researcher proposes a series of picture to
overcome the problem encountered by the students. Picture series is the
technique in which the researcher will show the students some pictures that are
chronologically arranged; furthermore, the students will be asked to interpret
the pictures being shown and ????
