CHAPTER I

INTRODUCTION
A. Background of The Problem
Every changes of education policy aim at improving the
outcomes of English language teaching. Thus, Indonesian
government tries to change the curriculum for many times. In
2004, the Ministry of National Education has decided to bring
in a new curriculum in all subject areas, including English. The
curriculum is known as Competence Based Curriculum or 2004
Curriculum which recommends a new approach, which is the
Genre-Based Approach.
In 2006, the curriculum changed into School-based
curriculum. Based on National Education Standard Boar, 2006,
it explains that School-based Curriculum is an operational
curriculum that is arranged and done by each school/
educational institution and the curriculum is still implement
until now.
The curriculum, recommends a new approach, that is
Genre -Based Approach. According to Lin (2006) in Genrebased Approach, teaching and learning focuses on the
understanding and production of selected genres of texts.
Teaching and learning around text genres has become

increasingly influential in main stream ELT in a number of

situations,

including

primary,

secondary,

tertiary,

professional and community teaching contexts involving

native speakers of English as well as ESL and EFL learners.
Based on the researchers preliminary observation,
Genre-Based Approach has been implemented in Junior High
School 9 Solok Selatan. Although the school is one of school
that implements Genre-Based Approach since 2006, but not
all of teachers implement this approach approppriately.
However, not all English teachers of Junior High School apply
this approach in the teaching and learning of English. Even
though they always join teachers training and the MGMP
(Musyawarah Guru Mata Pelajaran) meeting. They said that
Genre or Text-based approach was still difficult to apply it in
the teaching and learning of English.The English teachers
have not abillity to apply it approriate. Some of the teachers
did not understood this approach. The writer viewed from
lesson planning (RPP) in the implementation of KTSP. The
teachers have not planned 2 cycles ( oral and written cycles )
and 4 stages (BKoF, MoT, JCoT and ICoT) in teaching learning
prosess Based Genre Approach as appropriate. The teacher
only put BKOF and confused enter four stages in RPP.

Since the observation is done, the problems kept

happening in teaching and learning process. It can be seen
from activities done by teacher in (Building of Knowledge), the
teacher never give cultural context, the consequence is the
teacher can not relate students background knowledge with
the material. The students had not respond the teacher about
the material. The teacher seldom shares experience to the
students or used media, thus, students knowledge can not be
explore by the teacher and the students do not get
appropriate learning experience. Finally, the students can not
give their opinions dealing with the material. This stage must
to be conducted by the teacher to seek students opinion
about the material, so that the teacher is ready to participate
in all possible event and know to where the teacher will direct
them.
Furthermore, the teacher just straight to the second
stage (Modeling of Text). In this stage, the teacher never give
cultural context and seldom explain about social function and
generic structure of the text

so, the students dont know

about the generic structure of the text because the teachers

dont explain about it before.
At the third stage (Joint Construction of the Text), the
teacher uses monotonous technique by asking students to

make descriptive text without giving explanation about basic

paragraph construction consisiting of a topic sentence, some
supporting sentence and a concluding sentence, then ask
students to make a good paragraph about descriptive text,
what is done by the teacher make the students can not make
good paragraph since they didnt know how to construct the
paragraph.
In the last stage ( Independence Construction of Text),
students do not have excellent knowledge about the topic,
they can not produce meaningful task or text because the
teacher only ask to them read the book and then make a good
paragraph based like the text in the book without giving the
students some vocabulary about descriptive text. As Astaman
(2008) in his study says that the Genre-Based Approach
provides positive outputs for students in understanding and
producing a particular text type. The problems occur because
of lack of teachers knowledge about the concept of GenreBased Approach even some teachers acknowledge that they
do not understand about genre based approach. Therefore,
they can not implement it in their class and not only that the
problem that the researcher found, when the teacher teach in
the classroom, teachers didnt prepare lesson plan before she
or he just teach the students based students handbook.

Practically, Englih teachers at Junior High School 9 Solok

Selatan at eigh grade can not implement Genre-Based
Approach appropriately. It can be seen from three aspects
namely: age, experience, and certification. Although some
teachers have been fulfilled three aspects above, but some of
them can not implement Genre-Based Approach appropriately.
The problems above can be looked based on the
observation data done by researcher as follows:
Table 1
Observation Checklist Of Teachers Activities In
Teaching
Recount Text
No

Teacher
activate
situation in the text

Frequency
alway
s

BkoF
Cultural context
Shared experience
Control of relevant
vocabulary
Grammatical
patterns
MoT
Cultural context
Social function
Schematic structure
Linguistic features
Usingspoken
language to focus
on written text
JcoT
Schematic structure
Linguistic feature
Knowledge of field
IcoT
Schematic structure
Linguistic Features
Knowledge of field

Ofte
n

someti
me

Seldo
m

Neve
r

Based on the observation in the Junior High School

Negeri 9 Solok Selatan especially in VIII3 Class, there were
many students not able to realize competence both in learning
oral and written in the classroom yet. While discourse
competence requires students should be able to realize
competence in Orall and written skill. The writer looks at the
learning is too teacher centers, teacher almost not provides
the opportunity for students to interaction. However, In the
teaching and learning English the teachers task is to help the
students to achieve the communicative competence. Teacher
are required to have professional competence in order to be
able to teach English well and encourage the students to be
active in learning process. It means that the teacher should
implement appropriate teaching method in the process of
teaching and learning activities.
The phenomenon found in the field makes the students
writing competence is not well developed and students
writing score is low. It can be seen from the table below:

CLASS
VIII1
VIII2
VIII3
Mean
score

Table 1
Students English Score in Four Skill
at Class VIII SMPN 9 Solok Selatan
SCORES
Source: English
Listenin Readi Speaki Writing
Teacher of Junior
g
ng
ng
High School 9
54
58
62
53
Solok Selatan.
59
56
63
50
58
64
58
50
57
59
61
51

The students score above was gotten from the English

teacher of Junior High Scholl 9 Solok Selatan. The classes
above is taught by one English teacher from the table above,
it can be seen that the students skill in writing is the lowest of
all (students writing mean score is 51)
The main problem to be answered is why is teachers
procedure

in

writing

competence

is

uncertain?

Is

this

uncertainty caused by teachers lack understanding about

Genre Based Approach or is their uncer. The English teacher
knows what Genre Based Approach but she or he doesnt have
competency in applying Genre Based Approach.
Dealing with the explanation above, the researcher is
interested to investigate teachers process in teaching and
learning writing especially in descriptive text through Genrebased Approach. In this research the writer makes a research
entitled Uncertainty in Teaching and Learning Process of
Writing at Junior High School 9 Solok Selatan.
B. Identification of the Problem
Based on preliminary study at Junior High School 9 Solok
Selatan, the problems are identified in teaching descriptive
text as follows: In Building of Knowledge, the teacher never
gives cultural context; the consequence is the teacher can not
relate students background knowledge with the material. In

Modeling of Text, the teacher never give cultural context and

seldom explain about social function. In Joint Construction of
the Text, the teacher always uses monotonous technique
without

giving

explanation

about

basic

paragraph

construction. In Independence Construction of Text, the

students dont have excellent knowledge about the topic, they
can not produce meaningful task or text because the teacher
only ask them read the book and then make a good paragraph
based like the text in the book without giving the students
some vocabularies.
The absence of the primary stages above have resulted
in the uncertainty of teachers method and technique in
teaching which finding resulted in students low achievement
as described above.
Those uncertainty above in Genre Based Approach
stages can be analyze from there aspects as the source; they
are lesson plan, teaching and learning process and teachers
evaluation.
Lesson plan is important as the preparation before
conducting teaching and learning process: what will be done
by the teacher must be based on the lesson plan. Every
activity in every stage of genre is stated clearly in lesson plan.

After lesson plan is designed, teachers performance

also determines the successes of learning outcomes, what the
teacher will do based on the lesson plan.
The

last

aspect

that

determines

teaching

writing

outcome is evaluation which is conducted by the teacher at

the end, How the teacher designed

the evaluation that is

realized in form of evaluation it also influences the outcome.

C. Limitation of the Problem
In teaching and learning process of English at Junior
High School, there are five text types that should be taught to
the

students,

namely

recount,

narrative,

procedure,

descriptive, and report (Muhaimin, 2008: 272). But in this

research, the researcher limits the problem on the process of
teaching and learning writing descriptive text especially the
researcher want knows what the teachers technique in
teaching and learning process and how the teachers make a
instructional design and evaluate the technique through genre
based approach at grade eight of Junior High School 9 Solok
Selatan.
D. Formulation of the Problem
Concerning to the problem, the researcher formulated
the questions bellow as the guidance for the research:

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1. How does the English teacher carry out the writing

instruction?
2. How does the English teacher evaluate students writing
descriptive text?
E. Purpose of the Study
There purposes of the research are to describe:
1. Teachers technique in teaching writing descriptive text
2. Teachers technique in evaluating students writing
descriptive text
F. Significance of the Study
The outcome of this study is hoped to give some
contribution to the English teachers to enrich their knowledge
with the methods of language teaching by applying teaching
written based on genre based approach to increase students
ability in learning and produce kinds of text which is required
by the new curriculum (KTSP) in accurate and acceptable
language.
It is also expected that this research will give knowledge
for the English Department students at State Institute For
Islamic Studies (IAIN) Imam Bonjol Padang as a candidate of
English teachers to have background knowledge with the
methods

of

language

teaching

by

using

Genre-based

11

approach, so that they may not face problems in the field in

applying that approach in English classroom.
In addition, it is also hoped that this research will give
contribution to Education Department (Diknas) to realization
this approach by training for the English teachers, so that the
teachers can apply that approach in teaching and learning
process.
G. Defenition of the Key Term
In

order

make

more

understand

and

to

avoid

misunderstanding about this study, better for the researcher

to explain the meaning of the term of this study as follow:
1. Uncertainty is something that you cannot be sure about;
a situation that causes you to be or feel uncertain. (Hornby,
2010: 1675)
2. Teaching: is a demanding profession, or guiding and
faciliting learning, enabling the lerner to learn, setting the
conditions for learning, or a complex under taking involving
deasion, making at many levels as well as deversity of skill
or the deliberate facilitation of learning.
3. Learning process : the process whereby experiences are
gained which function effectively in meeting new situations
or usually complex process involving many of these forms

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orgaining knowledge or skill and being able to exhibit it to

another person.
4. Writing is the

process

of

selecting,

arranging

and

developing ideas in effective sentences, paragraphs, and

often, longer units of discourse. (Besral, 2006:10)
5. Genre-based Approach is the approach which

is

underpinned by a principle that a text cannot be separated

from its context, context of culture and situation (Rozimela:
2005).