1 CHAPTER1
INTRODUCTION
A. Backgrounds of the Study
Nowadays, English becomes an important language in all over the
world. So every country which does not use yet as its daily language in
conversation, try to make English as a subject that should be mastered by the
students. There are four skills in teaching English, there are listening, reading,
writing , and speaking. The students are expected to comprehend all the
skills, so they can understand either written or spoken English.
Writing is one of those skills which is also important, and it needs a
lot of practices. According to Oshima (1999: 3), writing is not easy. It takes
study and practice to develop this skill. She also said that for both native
speakers and new learners of English, it is important to note that writing is a
process, not a product. This means that a piece of writing is never complete;
that is always possible to review and revise, and review and revise again.
In the teaching learning process, the teachers mostly explain the
materials first, they use many kinds of learning media to make the students
understand the materials well. It is usually followed by exercises or
assessment to measure the students‟ understanding. The exercise or
assessment is mostly written. They should try to do or practiceit in writing
and the last, the teacher will correct it for revising the students‟ mistakes in
writing. It needs a lot of time to make the students write the correct writing.
process. If the teachers don‟t explain the materials clearly, they may make
many mistakes in their writing.
There are some steps in writing process. According to Richard
(2003: 3-4):
“An emphasis on language structure as a basis for writing
teaching istypically a four-stage process , there are
Familiarization, Controlled writing, Guided writing and the last is Free writing. In familiarization, learners are taught certain grammar and vocabulary,usually through a text. In controlled writing, learners manipulate fixed patterns, often fromsubstitution tables. In guided writing, learners imitate model texts and in free writing, learners use the patterns they have developed to writean essay, letter, and so forth.”
Writing a paragraph is not easy, the students should know the
construction how to make a correct sentences. A sentence, usually consists of
words, phrases, and clause. According to Blake and Moorhead (1993: 11), a
phrase is a group of words which have a grammatical relationship to each
other and which together form a structural unit. A phrase operates as an
element in clause structure. Then Kuiper and Allan (2004: 231) said that
sequences of words which move as whole units are intermediate between
words and sentences are called phrases. There are different kinds of phrases,
and they are designated according to the class of the most important word they
contain, which may be a noun phrase, verb phrase, preposition phrase,
adjective phrase or adverb phrase.
Noun phrase is a group of words in which the most important word
is a noun or a pronoun. Noun phrase may consist of one word or several
quite complex. The words which come before the headword are said to
premodify the noun, and those which come after to postmodify it.
Verb phrase is a group of words in which the most important word is
lexical verb. The different forms and combinations of lexical and auxilary
verbs are used to express its many properties and wide grammatical scope.
Preposition phrase is a unit of structure in which a preposition is the
most important word. The phrase usually consists of a preposition and a noun
phrase which is known as the prepositional complement. Prepositional
phrases can act as adverbials in sentence structure, or they can be
postmodifiers in a noun phrase.
Adjective phrase is a phrase whose head word is an adjective,
e.g. fond of steak, very happy, quite upset about it, etc. The adjective in an
adjective phrase can initiate the phrase (e.g. fond of steak), conclude the
phrase (e.g. very happy), or appear in a medial position (e.g. quite upset about
it).
In linguistics, an adverbial phrase is a group of two or more words
operating adverbially, meaning that their syntactic function is to modify
a verb, an adjective, or an adverb. Adverbial phrases ("AdvP" in syntactic
trees) are phrases that do the work of an adverb in a sentence.
In the level of Senior high school, there are many genres should be
thought. Genre is way of using language for particularpurposes. Richard
(2003: 18) stated to tell a story, request an overdraft, craft a love letter,
fororganizing messages because we want our readers to recognize our
purpose are called genre. He also adds that genres are both what
studentsactively do with language and how they come to understand the
waysit works. So when the students are going to write something, to acheive
the purpose of their writing, they should know the element of each genre.
There are many kinds of genre, they are descriptive, procedure,
report, recount, narrative, discussion, anecdote, analythical exposition,
hortatory exposition, explanation, news item, and review. Descriptive is a
kind of genre used to explain person, place, or thing in general. The generic
stucture of this text is identification and descriptions. The language features
of this text involve using simple present tense, adverb, action verb, words of
description or adjective. The purpose of descriptive text, according to Butt et
al. (2000); Martin, (1989) in Richard (2003: 20) is to give an account of
imagined or factual events and phenomena.
The writer is interested in conducting the research by analyzing the
phrases usually used by the students in writing descriptive text. The writer
asks studentsto construct descriptive text as the target genre. The writer
limited the theme by describing historical places to make students easier in
deciding the title. The writer also provides three historical places which are
popular in context of culture, so the students choose one as the target writing.
The writer has reason of choosing descriptive text as the object of
the tense is also easy. But sometimes they find the difficulties in making the
correct phrases.
After knowing the finding of the study, the writer drew conclusion
about the students‟ ability in writing of phrases, the types of phrases made by
the students in descriptive text, and the construction of phrases used by the
students in writing descriptive text.
In this study, the writer took the twelfth grade student of SMA N 1
Boyolali as subject of the research. Based on the explanation above, the
writer analyzed the use of phrases in writing descriptive text by the students
of SMA Negeri 1 Boyolali 2015/2016 academic year.
B. Limitation of the Study
In this research, the writer limits the study in writing descriptive text
by the students of SMA Negeri 1 Boyolali. The theme of the text is about
describing popular historical places. The writer took the students only taking
one class in the twelfth grade which consists of 31 students. The reason why
the writer limited this research because to make this research easy to
administerate and do not take long time to analyze.
C. Problem Statement
Based on the background above, the writer formulates the research
problems as follows:
2. What is the dominant phrasefound in descriptive text made by student?
3. What are the constructions of phrase used by the students?
D. Objectives of the Study
Based on the problem statements, the writer has the
followingobjectives:
1. To describe the students‟ ability in writing of phrases in descriptive text,
2. To knowthe dominant phrase found in descriptive text made by student,
and
3. To describe the constructions of phrase used by the students.
E. Benefits of the Study
1. Theoretical Benefit
The result of this research can be used to:
a. Give experience of technique used especially in teaching phrases,
b. Give better design teaching material in teaching learning process,
c. Give anadditional source in constructing phrases.
2. Practical Benefits
The result of this research can be very helpful for:
a. Students
The researcher hopes that this study will help the students to
b. Institution
Practical research is expected to contribute to the faculty and
institution in the development of competence in using phrases.
F. Research Paper Organization
This research is devided into five chapters presented as follows;
Chapter I gives the introduction which contains the background of the study,
limitation of the study, problem statement, objectives of the study, and the
benefit of the study. Chapter II presents of the previous study; theoretical
description of teaching writing, general concept of genre, descriptive text, and
phrases. Chapter III deals with research method which will discuss type of
research, object of the study, subject of the study, method of collecting data,
data validity, and technique for analyzing data. Chapter IV presents
interpretion of the result and discussion of the study. Chapter V presents some
