THE IMPLEMENTATION OF GENRE-BASED APPROACH IN AN EFL CONTEXT.

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CHAPTER I

INTRODUCTION

This chapter discusses seven main issues which are Background of the study, Research questions, Purpose of study, the Significance of the study, Research methodology, Definition of the terms, and Thesis organization.

1.1 Background of the Study

English curriculum has been changing many times in line with the changing of education curriculum in Indonesia. In its history, Indonesia has been implementing six curriculums, those are 1968, 1975, 1984, 1994 curriculums, 2004 or Competency Based Curriculum (although it has never been institutionalized by the government, it has once been implemented by piloting project schools), and KTSP (Kurikulum Tingkat Satuan Pendidikan, School Based Curriculum).

Each curriculum has its own paradigm. 1984 curriculum, for example, is content based curriculum, 1994 curriculum is objective based curriculum, 2004 curriculum is competency based curriculum, and KTSP is the revision of 2004 curriculum.

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In teaching-learning process, a teacher plays an important role (Brown, 1994). Teacher is one of the factors of the students’ success. It is assumed that teachers’ competence relates to the quality of their students. Competent teachers can result in qualified students and incompetent teachers can result in unqualified students. The logic is how incompetent teachers can do their instruction well.

Teachers, including English teachers, must be familiar with two things i.e. knowing what to teach and knowing how to teach. Knowing what to teach deals with materials or knowledge, meanwhile knowing how to teach deals with methods. It means that before doing their jobs, the teachers should ask themselves of what they are going to teach. After that they should think of how to teach it effectively.

Dealing with what material to teach a teacher must refer to the curriculum used. In 2004 curriculum and KTSP, English teaching learning materials are arranged or designed in the forms of genre. In year 10, for example, the students are recommended to learn recount, narrative, procedure, descriptive, and news item genres.

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Most of the English teachers at Senior High Schools in Depok, as far as I know as the head of MGMP, have never got any training on genre based approach. Some teachers just have got some training on KTSP in general. Because it is new to English teachers in Depok, the application of the approach in a classroom setting needs affirmation. To investigate how it is implemented needs a study. It is due to the reason that this study is conducted.

1.2 Research Questions

The research questions to be answered are as follows: 1. How does the teacher prepare the lesson?

2. How does the teacher conduct the teaching learning process in the classroom?

3. How does the teacher evaluate the students’ learning achievement? 4. What does the teacher understand of the Genre Based Approach?

1.3 Purpose of the Study

Based on the research questions above, the purpose of this study are as follows:

1. To find out how the teacher prepares the lesson;

2. To describe the instructional practices conducted by the teacher;

3. To find out how the teacher evaluates the students’ learning achievement; and

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1.4 The Significance of the Study

The results of this research are expected to inform both practitioners as front liners of the government’s policy at schools and the government (General Directorate of Quality the Improvement of Educator and Educational Persons) as the decision maker.

For the teachers, it gives a clear definition of what the Genre Based Approach is, it gives a description of an established model of English instruction in preparing students to obtain the goals of learning English at Senior High School, and it gives some contributions in the field of teaching and learning of EFL to those who involve in the teaching and leaning English at Senior High School.

For the decision maker, the results of this research can become a good input to be considered in making policy for EFL education in secondary schools

For the other researchers, the results of this research can stimulate those who intend to carry on research in the same field with certain interest.

1.5 Research Methodology

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Interviews are done right after each observation conducted. It is done in order to get explanation about what the teacher does in the classroom.

The data gained from classroom observations and interviews are first transcribed and categorized, then analyzed by using Genre Based Approach theory and finally presented in the form of description as the findings.

1.6 Definition of the Terms

A number of terms used in the study need to be defined in order to avoid misunderstanding, misinterpretation, or ambiguity. They are defined as follows:

Genre is any kind of text that has its own communicative goals,

generic structures, and lexico-grammatical features.

Genre Based Approach (GBA) is defined as the approach of

teaching genre in one cycle initiated by Building Knowledge of the Field through Modeling, Joint Construction of Text, and ended by Independence Construction of Text.

EFL Context means the context of teaching English as a Foreign

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1.7 Thesis Organization

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CHAPTER III

RESEARCH METHODOLOGY

This chapter is devoted to the description of the process of doing the research. These include research problems, research design, data collection, and data analysis.

3.1 Research Problems

This study starts with research questions as follows: 1. How does the teacher prepare the lesson?

2. How does the teacher conduct the teaching learning process in the classroom?

3. How does the teacher evaluate the students’ learning achievement? 4. What does the teacher understand of the Genre Based

3.2 Research Design

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To enable the researcher to obtain data which are relevant to the research questions of the study, classroom observations are used. This is also aimed at inferring the process of teaching and learning conducted by the teacher, such as the presentation of the teacher in front of the class and the students’ participation during the presentation. The processes of teaching and learning were recorded as they occurred in their natural context of instruction. Besides, interviews are also conducted in order to examine the reasons beyond the choices of each activity found in classroom observations. Then the data are analyzed to determine the recurring patterns. The results are finally described using emic perspective.

This study is also theoretically qualitative because it was conducted inductively. Meaning that the study began from data colleted from the field, analyzed and then explored, not directed to the questions asked by researcher (Creswell, 1984:21). It is also case study because the data collected are taken from teacher implementing the Genre Based Approach in her teaching practice.

3.3 Data Collection

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3.3.1 Research Site

The research is conducted at a Senior High School in Depok. This school was chosen because it is one of the top schools in Depok, it is easy to access because the researcher is one of the teachers there, and all of the English teachers there have a good relationship with the researcher.

The school is located in Sukmajaya District, Depok Municipality. It is a senior high school with two majors; science and social. It has about 750 students with five English teachers.

3.3.2 The subject of Study

The subjects of the study are an English teacher, the students, and the Headmaster.

The headmaster was the source of information concerning the policy taken in the school related to the improvement of English teaching learning by using Genre-based Approach.

The study is concerned with an English teacher. The teacher is one of the English teachers at the school with English education background and more than 15 years experience in teaching English at Senior High School.

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3.3.3 Instrumentation

This study needs a variety of instruments in the data collecting process such as audio-recorder, field notes, and interview guides. Audio recorder is a useful instrument to record several interviews with the headmaster, teacher, and students. It is also used to record classroom talks during classroom observations. Observation field notes are effectively used to document events or situations uncovered by the audio-recorder. Interview guides are instruments that are used to focus the investigation as a whole.

3.3.4 Data Collection Method

3.3.4.1 Observation

In qualitative research, the trustworthiness and authenticity of the data collection play a very important role (Guba, 1981; Lincoln & Guba, 1985 as cited in Musthafa, 2000). To get the trustworthiness and authenticity of the data collection, the data are collected by conducting four classroom observations. It is done in order to obtain a rich understanding about the classroom interaction including the strategies being used, students and teacher activities, instructional material being provided, and the measurements that are conducted to evaluate the students’ learning achievement.

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about when the class began, how many students were present, comments about teacher’s or students’ activities by writing them on a notebook that had been prepared before.

Then in the next chance at home the class observations were transcribed and were dated and given codes according to the date. So CO 505 means Classroom Observation conducted on May 5 (Musthafa, 1997). The field notes were also dated and given codes such as FN 505 meaning Field Notes taken on May 5.

Document collections were used to find out information supporting the data obtained from observations. For example, syllabus was used to compare if the instructional practices done by the teacher were in line with the current syllabus. Test materials were used to check if they are based on the material taught. And test results were used to know the students’ learning achievement.

3.3.4.2 Interview

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did must have had a reason that could be known by observation. One open ended interview was conducted to some students all together and several informal talks were also made to students to look into how they liked studying in Genre Based Approach as implemented in their class. And several probing interviews to students to clarify what they did during pair works and group works and to know whether they used English as a means of communication during the work were also made.

3.4 Data Analysis

The goal of data analysis is to discover patterns, ideas, explanations, and understanding (McMillan, 1992: 221). He also argues that data collection and analysis of qualitative studies are interwoven, influencing each other. Therefore, in this study the analysis was carried out during the data collection was going on as well as after the data collection.

The processes of data analysis are as follows: by using research questions as a guide, analysis began with continual examination of data during the data collection (Musthafa, 1997).

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In working with the sets of transcribed data with some marginal notations, threads in the form of transcripts were identified. It was done in order to find out a helpful way of representing the interconnected threads (Alwasilah, 2000) related to the four research questions of this study. And those four research questions became the categorizations.

As supporting data, document collections were also analyzed. Documents in the form of syllabus and official papers were analyzed to support the first category. Meanwhile, documents in the forms of instructional materials were analyzed to support the second category. And documents in the forms of test materials, and students’ scores or test results were selected to support the third category.

Second, teacher’s interviews were converted into written form. The interview transcripts were then read many times and notations were made in the margins to look for statements representing the emic perspective mainly related to the research questions. They were then coded. The codes were later used as categories to organize the data together with other data from other sources.

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3.5 Concluding Remarks

This chapter has drawn the methodology of this study that made used of qualitative design employing case study as its method and approach.

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CHAPTER V

CONCLUSIONS AND RECOMMENDATIONS

This chapter consists of two sections. The first section discusses the conclusions drawn from the findings and analysis and the second section discusses the recommendations for the teachers, the decision maker, and the future research.

5.1 Conclusions

This study investigated how the teacher prepared the lesson for classroom instruction; what the teacher did in teaching and learning process; how the teacher evaluated her students’ learning achievement; and the teacher’s understandings of Genre Based Approach. From the results and discussions in the previous chapters, several conclusions can be drawn.

First, related to how the teacher prepared the lesson, the teacher has not done it maximally. The use of authentic materials such as newspapers and magazines is good, but it will be better if the teacher made a written lesson plan.

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one session such as pre-activity, main activity, and post activity was still used by the teacher.

Third, how the teacher evaluated her students’ learning was done both by giving formal written test conducted at the end of a genre learned and by evaluating them during the process of learning. The test items given did not check the students’ knowledge on the purpose, the generic structures, and the language features of a text.

Finally, regarding the teacher’s understandings of Genre Based Approach, it can be concluded that the teacher did not understand the concept. She did not know how to teach genre as recommended by genre based approach.

Based on the findings, it can be said that the teacher needs improvement of what Genre Based Approach is and how to apply the GBA in daily teaching learning process. The students’ learning achievement is relatively good in term of that it is higher than the minimal success criteria. It will be better if the teacher apply genre based approach in teaching genre.

5.2 Recommendations

Based on the findings from the study which can perhaps not be generalized to other settings, there are four recommendations.

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lesson plan. Materials that we can deliver should be various. We can use various sources for our teaching. The materials can be taken from our surroundings such newspaper, magazine, recipe books, and so on.

Second, the lessons should be presented based on the approach recommended by the curriculum. Genre Based Approach is an integration part of curriculum used in our English education system, so the teaching of English should be based on it.

Third, the teachers should check the students’ learning progress by doing some evaluation. Evaluation can be done in the form of test or non test. Post test will be better conducted at the end of every session. At the end of a program, a genre for instance, teacher can give a written test to assess the students’ comprehensive knowledge of the genre.

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