CHAPTER I

INTRODUCTION

This study deals with the use of mind mapping as a teaching strategy to
improve the students ability of class VII A SMPN 1 Pasirian to write Descriptive
Text. This introduction presents and discusses some important points, namely
background, Research problem, Research objective, significance of the study.
1.1. Background of the study
Although the objective of teaching English Writing is clearly stated
in National Curriculum, that is, to enable students to write accurately,
fluently, and appropriately. In monolog text, the quality of their ability in
writing English indicated unsatisfactory results, such as low achievement
and motivation.
In this globalization era, English plays an important role in
international communication. As the most widely spoken language in the
world, English is used in various contexts, such as in political affairs,
academic affairs or business affairs, as well as in many informal contexts.
The Ability in using English-orally and in written form is a must
every days life nowadays. The lack of it may entail the failure in facing
globalization. As a member of world society, one is required to master
English, which is used by the majority of the world population. Through
English, one can also acquire knowledge as it is the language used in
academic affairs and most-read references are written in English. Thus, we

cannot deny that English needs to be mastered by every single person in

this country in order to be able to complete in the future. Moreover on
National Educational System states that secondary school graduate have to
own adequate English competency in order to fulfil the demands of skilled
and competing human resources for domestic as well as foreign needs and
the requirement to continue their study to higher education, e.g. to
universities. And the competency covers the four skills; Listening,
Speaking, Reading and Writing, as required by Competency-based
Curriculum (Depdiknas 2004: 3). As for the junior high school, the student
are required to have competence in the functional literacy level. It means
that they are taught to be able to use English to perform several function in
daily life. Students are able to learn the four skills and use them in
appropriate contexts (Depdiknas, 2004). Based on the preliminary
observation conducted at SMPN 1 Pasirian Lumajang, dated 14 and 16
of April 2014 the researcher found that the students in writing a descriptive
text are still far from sufficient. The finding is based on the information
from the English teacher at this school. From the interview and the
observation in the field, she identified some problems faced by the teacher
in teaching writing descriptive in term of strategy. The strategy of teaching
writing descriptive text applied in this school is still traditional in which
the students are asked to translate every words before the students
arranged into sentences and from sentences into a text individually. The

teacher said that students who have low ability in writing descriptive text
get difficulty in accomplishing the task.
To cope with the problems above, the researcher and the teacher as
her collaborator intend to apply one of the technique namely mind
mapping. Writing is one of the skills that students have to learn. However,
based on writers experience and observation, it seems to be the most
difficult among other skills. Most students get difficulties in mastering
skills.
There are two factors encountered by students are: the lack of
writing technique, and creativity. As for techniques, it is usually found that
students are not taught well enough on how to write good paragraph. Most
of the time, teachers merely give a topic or an idea to student to let them
develop the topic or idea on their own, we call it free writing. The result,
as we guess, will not be satisfying. Meanwhile, creativity is not easy to
teach because not all people are born creative. Yet, techniques of writing
may be taught to help students develop their creativity- as one of teachers
responsibility to guide students in the process of writing.
Problem is usually defined as a gap between the expectation and
the reality. What is expected from an instructional process is the success of
students to perform good command in English, orally and in written form,
in this case the focus is writing. The reality, however, shows that most
students have a lot of difficulties in writing. Among others are:

1. Getting idea. Finding a good idea is not easy. In fact, it needs a lot of
hard work and practice before students can learn how to get a good
idea. Usually, it takes much time for students to get a single idea.
From the writers observation students spent half of allocated time to
do this.
2. Developing idea. After trying hard to get an idea, students are
expected to develop into paragraph. Most students find difficulties in
this part because they dont know how to develop the idea into
sentences, let alone into paragraph. They dont know how to express
their thought or feeling in writing form and to know how to construct
a good paragraph with good coherence. Most of them only combine
sentences having been made before into paragraph randomly- there is
no unity.
3. Using good grammar. Grammar, especially in writing, is of great
importance. An idea can only be well communicated to others if it
presented by using good grammar.
4. The students have low motivation and interest in writing
1.2. Research problem
The writer states the problem of this research as follows: How can
the skill of writing descriptive text of the first year students SMPN 1
Pasirian be improved through mind-mapping techniques?

1.3. The Objective of the study

Based on the research problem, the purpose of this study is to
describe how mind-mapping technique can improve the students ability of
class VII A SMPN 1 Pasirian to write descriptive text.
1.4. Significance of the study
As it is a classroom action research, the advantages of the research
are mostly for the practical reason. This research is expected to find one of
good solutions to the problem encountered by teachers and students in
writing a descriptive paragraph. The writer hopes that this research can be
useful in any English classroom and that model developed in this research
can be used by other English teachers to conduct their class, especially in
writing.