CHAPTER I

INTRODUCTION

This chapter contains background, identification of the problem, limitation of the

problem, objective of the research, significance of the research and organization

of the thesis.

A. Background

English is important to be learned as it is an iinternational language that

has a purpose to communicate with all people all around the world. People need to

be able to speak English in order that they can share their information from one

person to another person in the same time or different time. Mostly, people will

take more concern on how that they can speak English fluently. Therefore, most

of English learners try to practice speaking more often. People tend to think the

success of it is on how to use the language in spoken activity.

In contrast, English has changed its concept in term of the language use;

the spoken language, which is very dominant, will be followed by the more

dominant of the written language. Thus, the objective of the English teaching and

learning must be emphasized at helping the students to be able to communicate

both in spoken and written forms. The ability of writing can be seen when the

students composing a task such as journal, diary, or even writing a common text.

Writing is also one of the most important skills that every student should

have especially in academic world since everything needs to be written, like

writing a report, writing research paper, writing story and so on. However, most

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people still find it difficult. As one of language skills, writing is not as natural as

speaking, even though it is the speakers’ native language. Brown (2004:334)

stated that humans being universally learn to walk and to talk, but that swimming

and writing are culturally specific learned behavior. He said that the problem in

creating writing product is in its composing process to be a product, which

requires hard thinking, drafting and revising procedures. In addition, writing

requires idea, selection of words, and good structure. Therefore, writing requires a

lot of time to compose it as it is not natural skills and requires a long time learning

process.

It is clear that writing skills is important but in fact the teaching of writing

is not successful yet. It can be seen from the learners’ performances in writing and

their responses towards writing. Most of the English learners might agree that

writing is the most difficult skill to master. Students’ low interest and lack ability

in writing their ideas with the use of correct grammar, vocabulary and punctuation

are some indicators showing the unsuccessful of teaching writing. The first

indicator is the students’ low interest in writing compared to their interest in

speaking. They prefer to express their ideas orally rather than to express them in

the written forms. As the result, students can speak English fluently but they

cannot write in English well. Another indicator is that most students find it

difficult in using correct grammar, vocabulary and punctuation to compose

English sentences into readable and acceptable texts.

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 Supporting the points above, the specific problems happen in EFL

(English as Foreign Language) country. As English is not the first language,

teaching writing can be said to be a difficult one. Brown (2004:334) also said in

English as Second Language countries, teaching writing to second language has

number of controversial issue. As well as in ESL countries, teaching writing is

found to be difficult to be taught in English as Foreign Language country such as

Indonesia. Since English is taught as foreign language, English is rarely used

outside the classroom. Even in the classroom, only few students take a chance to

practice it. Based on the situation, it has affected the students’ English. According

to Mistar (in Braine, 2005) the students’ achievement in English is still far from

satisfactory. Many students still have problem in written and spoken English

(Handayani in Hapsari, 2015).

Based on the explanation above, writing can be considered as one of the

most difficult skills for L2 learners to learn. It lies not only in generating and

organizing ideas, but also in translating the ideas to be readable text. The skills

involved in writing are highly complex. L2 writers have to pay attention to higher

level skill of planning and organizing as well as lower level skills of spelling,

punctuation, word choice, grammar, sentence structure, the comprehension and so

on. The difficulty becomes more highlighted if the language proficiency is weak.

In addition, the problem becomes bigger since most general concern of

school nowadays requires students’ thinking. Today, both critical thinking and

creative thinking skills are being taught in most Asian schools and those skills are

required so that the student can think critically in order to be able to analyze the

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argument. The argument making is considered to be tricky since it is required the

students’ logic and the ability to comprehend the issue. Students are required to

read books or articles a lot while nowadays most of students focus more on

gadgets to play games.

Concerning the topic of this case, in Indonesia there are still many students

that feel reluctant in creating argument. In this case, the reason behind it is

because the practice of critical thinking is not practically practiced in our current

curriculum. Teaching English at school does not focus to create product (in kind

of critical spoken or even writing). Our curriculum tends to focus more on reading

and grammar skills. Even though, critical writing is considered as important skills

that the high school students should have, most students find it is hard to do it.

Most of them are stuck in composing the ideas and arranging the sentence in the

correct order. These problems need further solution from all education stack-

holders.

Besides, after graduating from high school, the higher level after this

requires students to have good writing skills in both critical thinking and sentence

structure. The High Schools students are expected to have great critical thinking

as the next generation for Indonesia. They are supposed to compose their fresh

thought so that this idea can be used to Indonesia development in the future. In

university later, the writing of essay and proposal will be their daily friends too.

Therefore it is necessary for all students in High Schools to have great critical

thinking.

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 Another aspect for the concern is about the students’ ability to composing

sentence into the right orders. The students should have good knowledge of

sentence structure mastery so that the message that they want to convey can be

delivered well. In other ideas, the writing should be easily understood. In

contrasts, most of students sometimes still have problem in putting the word

orders or deciding the phrases. It should be a concern for all teachers since when

they graduate from High Schools, some reports that they make should be made in

written English.

Moreover, each language has a special structure of the language

concerned. Llanguage is a unit in the vocabulary and the sentences arranged and

pronounced to create and deliver meaning. Grammar or language structure is

based on the referring to the analysis of grammar in language descriptive which

explains the principles of language structure and arrangements words. Grammar is

a formal description of language structure.

The basic function of language structure is to help people communicate

with one another through speech, whether verbal, written or through sign

language. Although there are many different languages, they share the same basic

attributes of sounds, word and sentence formation, and meaning and cadence of

speech. In English, it has the main part which is included in a sentence, i.e. S

(Subject), V (Verb), and O (object).

Learning structure is not only important, but also is needed by certain

requirements applied. First, point proposed is the structure comes out from

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English, not the Latin one. Second, it also must be rational and has a good basic

foundation. Structure is logically should be accounted for. Achmad (2002: 113)

said that in a view of grammatical which assumes the language structure as

hierarchy subsystem. The sentence is only one unit remains bound to the larger

unit, or can stand alone. There is a possibility of a relative in a larger unit that

sentence stand alone, has the final intonation pattern, the actual and potential

consisting of the clause. In conjunction with syntactic units (words, phrases, and

clauses), the sentence can be viewed as a construct composed of the basic

constituents, which is usually a clause, with final intonation, and if necessary

fitted with conjunctions. Thus, there are two important issues related to the

sentence, the basic constituents (words, phrases, and clauses) and the final

intonation.

Summing up the topic above, the writer finally has interested in

conducting research in her hometown, Tangerang Regency. Several years ago, the

writer ever taught in some High Schools in Tangerang and employing a research

about implementing debate as a way to improve students’ speaking skills. It was a

qualitative research which resulted that some students still have difficulties in

composing their ideas when delivering an argument regarding to the issue being

talked. In addition, the sentence structures that the students uttered were still

grammatically error and were a little bit harder to be understood. In this

opportunity, the writer is interested if the same case will have an effect when the

students composing the expository writing. However, this research will only

focus on whether or not there is significant effect of students’ critical thinking and

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sentence structure mastery towards students’ writing exposition text without

analyzing the qualitative aspects which may occur since this is a quantitative

research.

Therefore, the writer needs to do double check with some schools in

Tangerang regency, about the effect of sentence structure mastery and critical

thinking on students’ writing exposition text. The indicator of sentence structure is

chosen because if students are able to create good and right structure, it will be

easier for them to form the sentence and it can make the writing product becomes

understandable to read. In addition, critical thinking is chosen because writing an

expository text requires critical thinking to create and analyze the arguments.

In conclusion, this research aims to investigate whether or not there are

any effects of sentence structure mastery and critical thinking on students’ writing

exposition text. The writer will try to find out if students’ critical thinking and

sentence structure mastery altogether can have significant effect on students’

writing exposition text. At the same time, the writer is also trying to find out if

each of the independent variable can give significant effect to the students’

writing exposition text. Therefore, based on the explanation above, the writer

wants to conduct a research with the title: “The Effect of Students’ Sentence

Structure Mastery and Critical Thinking towards the Students’ writing

exposition text. (A Survey at Senior High Schools in Tangerang Regency).”

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B. Identification of Problem

Based on the background of the research, some following problems can be

identified as follow:

1. Is there any effect of critical thinking towards students’ writing exposition text

at Senior High Schools in Tangerang Regency?

2. Is there any effect of sentence structure mastery towards students’ writing

exposition text at Senior High Schools in Tangerang Regency?

3. Are there any effects of critical thinking and sentence structure mastery

towards students’ writing exposition text at Senior High Schools in Tangerang

Regency?

4. Are the students able to write expository with good grammar?

5. Do the students like writing expository text in English?

C. Limitation of Problem

Many factors should be researched to find out, but unfortunately it would

take time. Realizing that the writer has no enough time execute them, the writer

tries to limit the object of research between two variables only as predictors. They

are Students’ Critical thinking (X1), Students’ Sentence Structure Mastery (X2),

and expository writing skills (Y) as dependent variables.

Therefore, taken from Identification of the problem, there are three

limitations of the problems, as follow:

1. The effect of sentence structure mastery towards students’ writing exposition

text at Senior High Schools in Tangerang Regency.

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2. The effect of critical thinking towards students’ writing exposition text at

Senior High Schools in Tangerang Regency.

3. The effect of sentence structure mastery and critical thinking towards

students’ writing exposition text at Senior High Schools in Tangerang

Regency.

D. Statement of the Problem

Based on the background and identification of the problem above, the

writer is going to find out the formulated problems as follow:

1. Is there any effect of sentence structure mastery towards students’ writing

exposition text at Senior High Schools in Tangerang Regency?

2. Is there any effect of critical thinking towards students’ writing exposition text

at Senior High Schools in Tangerang Regency?

3. Are there any effects of sentence structure mastery and critical thinking

towards students’ writing exposition text at Senior High Schools in Tangerang

Regency?

E. Objective of the Research

Based on the Formulation of the Research above, the objectives of this

research are to analyze and to know about:

1. The effect of sentence structure mastery towards students’ writing exposition

text at Senior High Schools in Tangerang Regency.

2. The effect of critical thinking towards students’ writing exposition text at

Senior High Schools in Tangerang Regency.

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3. The effect of sentence structure mastery and critical thinking towards

students’ writing exposition text at Senior High Schools in Tangerang

Regency.

F. Significant of the writer

The results of this research are theoretically and practically expected to

give contribution to educational institutions.

1. Theoretically

The result of the research is expected to increase the contribution to the

existing theories in order to strengthen them where there is significant effect of

critical thinking and sentence structure mastery on writing skill in exposition text.

2. Practically

The results of the research are also to give contribution to students,

English lecturer, the institutions, and the other researcher. For the students, they

should realize that writing activity is interesting. For English teacher, this result

can contribute new insight for the implementation of the teaching of writing skill.

In teaching and learning process, English teacher can encourage their students to

arouse their students’ writing skills. For the institutions, it can give more

reputation with the achievement of a new knowledge that will make them believe

many people for their students’ education. For the other researcher, it can enrich

knowledge and experience and enhance the motivation to keep learning and

studying.

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G. Organization of the thesis

To be organized, this research proposal is presented in three chapters with

following systematics:

The first chapter consists of introduction that includes an explanation of

the background of research, identification of the problems, limitation of the

problems, objectives of the research and organization of the thesis.

The second chapter presents the theories description, the frame of thinking

and hypothesis.

The third chapter consists of research methodology, the place and time of

the research, the methods of the research, the research variables, the population

and sample, research instruments, the instrument testing, the sampling techniques,

and statistical hypothesis.

The fourth chapter presents research result and discussion.

The fifth chapter consists of conclusion and suggestions.

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