A STUDY ON THE ABILITY OF THE FIRST YEAR STUDENTS OF SMA N 1 ANDONG IN READING NARRATIVE TEXT IN 2007 / 2008 ACADEMIC YEAR

ASTRIYANI, ROMIE (2009)

Abstract
This research is aimed to analyze the ability of the first year students of SMA N I Andong in understanding the generic structure of narrative text, the ability of the first year students of SMA N I Andong in understanding the structure elements of narrative text, and the difficulties faced by the students to understand the generic structure and the structure elements of narrative text. This research is a qualitative research. The data are taken from document analysis. The object of the study is the to describe the ability of the first year students of SMA N I Andong in understanding the generic structure and the structure elements, and to describe difficulties faced by the students in understanding the generic structure and structure elements of narrative text in reading. The result of study is the students’ ability in understanding generic structure of narrative text is good more than a half of the students achieve this category that is 70%. The students’ ability in understanding structure elements of narrative text is good. It is proved that more than a half of the students achieve this category that is 57.5%. There are some difficulties in understanding generic structure and structure elements of narrative text, the students could not comprehend the text because they do not understand the meaning of the difficult words, they have no dictionary and they feel lazy to ask the difficult word to the teacher. The students also could not recognize the text because the students can not remember the generic structure of the narrative text and they confuse to identify the generic structure and the structure element of the narrative text.

CHAPTER I
INTRODUCTION
A. Background of the Study
In education, curriculum is the most important thing besides teacher, tools,
and the others. Curriculum is used to become the basic concept in education and to
be the indicator of the success of education. Indonesia has applied many
curriculums for education such as; the Curriculum 1968, 1975, 1984, 1994,
and try out of the curriculum in 2004.
Based on the School Level-Based on Curriculum or Kurikulum
Satuan Tingkat Pendidikan (KTSP) which was legitimated in
2006, the English lesson in senior high school is focused on
speaking, reading, listening and writing skills. Even there were
in national or international level, student should master the four
skills; reading, speaking, listening, and writing. For them who
were wanted to continue their study abroad, they must master
their IBT Toefl or ETS (English for Tertiary Studies) (http://re-
searchengines.com/artsiyanti.html).
The Curriculum 2006/ 2007, gives the right and authority to the school to make
and develop the curriculum, so the teacher should be active and creative in
making and developing the curriculum. The school also has to consider the
culture, regional potential, and the ability of the students in d
eveloping the
curriculum. The choice of certain method used in class should be suited with
the goal of teaching learning process based on the curriculum, as the right
method will result the better achievement. For example, before 2007 the
school used the Competency-Based Curriculum but since 2007 until now,
curriculum used by most schools is the School Level Based Curriculum or
Kurikulum Tingkat Satuan Pendidikan (KTSP) in which the basic language
skills are taught and trained intensively based on the genres and functional
speeches.
One of the competences in KTSP (kurikulum Satuan Tingkat
Pendidikan) is reading where the students have to understand the various
nuances of meaning and the steps or rhetoric development in written text
especially in discourse which form recount, narrative, procedure, descriptive,
news item. Kennedy (1981: 8-9) states that “ of the foundations in reading is one
the ability to organize a series of fact, events or ideas into logical order”. It is
similar with the syllabus in KTSP where the teacher must introduce narrative text
as one of genre of paragraph. Narrative text is the form of writing used to relate
the story of acts or events.
English learning cannot be separated from the curriculum. English learning
in senior high school is not only learning about vocabulary and language
rules, but the students also must be able to use it as a communication media
by apply it into a real conversation. Student can not be called clever if he/she
can not apply it in a real conversation even he/s he have got a good mark in
English.
Since 2006/ 2007 academic year, SMA N I Andong has applied new
curriculum named the School Level Based Curriculum. As explained above, this-curriculum gives opportunities to the school or teacher to develop the curriculum which
considers the culture, regional potential, and the ability of the students. The school of
SMA N I Andong also develops the curriculum based on the potential that it has. On
learning language, the students of SMA N 1 Andong learn again the
receptive ability which has been taught in Junior high school such as
listening, reading, speaking, writing, but in senior high school the receptive
and productive ability will focused on English learning process.
On reading they still use the old way lesson, by reading anything
which is organized as texts. Teacher helps them with the text but sometimes
students must find their own text from other writing. To make their students
more focus and not bored, the teacher gives them text that they have to read.
SMA N 1 Andong is also facilitated by the internet that comes into Andong to get a
lot of information about education.
The writer uses narrative text to be analyzed because it is guided by
several questions about the text itself, the vocabulary within can be made
simple or complicated depending on the students’ ability. The study in
reading narrative text will give a habit to student in reading text and also will
raise the ability of answering the question about the text. With a great and
good habit, student will also master their ability in memorizing vocabularies.
Those reasons above are significant reasons which make the writer interested
in analyzing of first students of SMA N 1 Andong in reading Narrative text.
On doing the analysis the writer takes the sample of reading text material which
includes short stories and new stories because it is to muse and to entertain, and to deal
with actual or vicarious experience in different ways. The stories are taken from the first
year package books such as “The Tortoise and The Monkey”, “Why Do Hawk Hunt
Chick?”, “A Lion and a Mouse” and also with the multiple choice questions for each
text. That narrative text above is a kind of short story text.
The phenomenon above explains that there is no doubt for a school to
develop curriculum but in developing the curriculum the school has to consider the
ability of the students, and it makes the researcher interested in conducting a research
entitled:
A Study on the Ability of the First Year Students of SMA N I Andong in
Reading Narrative Text in 2007/ 2008 Academic Year.
B. Problem Statement
From the background of the study above, the writer formulates the problems
of the study as follows:
1. How is the ability of the first year students of SMA N I Andong in
understanding the generic structure of narrative text?
2. How is the ability of the first year students of SMA N I Andong in
understanding the structure elements of narrative text?
3. What are the difficulties faced by the students to understand the generic
structure and the structure elements of narrative text?
C. Objective of the Study
The objective of the study is to describe the ability of the first year
students of SMA N I Andong in understanding the generic structure and the structure
elements, and to describe difficulties faced by the students in understanding the
generic structure and structure elements of narrative text in reading.
D. Limitation of the Study
The researcher only focuses the problem of the study on the ability and
difficulty faced by the first year students of SMA N I Andong in understanding the
generic structure and structure elements of narrative text in reading.
E. Benefit of the Study
From this research, the writer expects many benefits:
1. Theoretical Benefit
a. The result of this study hopefully can give much input to other
researchers who want to analyze the ability of the students in reading
narrative text.
b. This research can be used for the teacher to find new innovation in
teaching reading narrative text.
2. Practical Benefit
a. This paper can give much information for the teacher about the ability
of students in reading narrative text.
b. This paper shows the ability of the students in reading, so they will be
encouraged to improve their ability in reading narrative text.
F. Paper Organization
The writer arranges the organization of the paper as a follows:
Chapter I is introduction that contains background of the study, previous
study, limitation of the study, and the research organizations.
Chapter II is underlying theories. It discusses the notion of reading, the
component of reading, the notions of narrative text, the generic structure or
narrative text, the idea of narrative text, and the language features of narrative
text.
Chapter III is research method. It presents research approach, data, data
sources, technique of collecting data, and techniques of analyzing data.
Chapter IV is research finding and discussion, and
Chapter V is conclusion and suggestion.