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 ????
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