CHAPTER 1

INTRODUCTION

1.1 Background

English is one of the subjects that should be learned in Indonesia, from high

school to university. In learning English, the students have to understand the four

skills, namely listening, speaking, reading, and writing. To support the

achievement of the skills, the students should master vocabulary, pronunciation,

and grammar. Every time students learn English, one of the components which

they usually faced is grammar.

Grammar is one of the important language components which should be

achieved by the students who learn English because it is able to help the students

in making sentences easily and correctly. According to Brown (2001:362),

“Grammar is as a system of rules and governing the conventional arrangement

relationship of words in the sentence”. Tense is one of language grammar which

plays important part to construct sentences.

The current English curriculum expects students are able to use grammatical

sentences either in written form or oral form. In order to be capable in language

written form, grammar rules come up to be taught to the students. This statement

has been stated in school-based curriculum (2006) that based on the English

purpose or competency which will be achieved; grammar, vocabulary, and

pronunciation must be included and are composed in contextual English teaching

in order to produce understandable English.

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English grammar teaching is not as easy as we think, because English grammar

is quite difficult rather than Bahasa Indonesia. In Bahasa Indonesia we can use a

same verb for literally every time. For instance, “saya makan” which means I eat,

can be used to show that I eat at present and I ate yesterday. Meanwhile, in

English, we cannot use that. We have to change the verb according to the time we

mean. This is happening because in Bahasa Indonesia there is no tense system, so

it makes many students have considerable difficulty with the English tense

system. Peterson (1985) explains,

The English tense system is quite complicated, but the most common
problem is how to form tenses. The biggest problem is deciding which
tense to use in a given situation. In order to choose correctly and easily,
the students must understand the meaning of the tense itself, its time
picture or timeline. He or she must know what kind of activities and
states can be described by certain verbs. Certain verbs are limited in
their usage, and this can present problems too.
From the statement above, the writer concludes there are some difficulties in

learning tense, especially the simple present tense. First, most of the students still

do not understand the forms and the use of simple present tense. Second, many

students are confused in differentiating which subjects use auxiliaries do and

viceversa. They often do not understand why some sentences use auxiliaries, is,

am, and are instead of auxiliaries do and does. For example, the students say “She

is read a newspaper”, even though they can say “She reads a newspaper”. Third,

the students are not enthusiastic with the teaching and learning process about

grammar. That is why the teacher should be more creative in arranging the

material.

From these problems, the researcher thinks one of the alternative strategies
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to improve the understanding in English, to improve the education quality

especially in SMP NEGERI 19 PALU is to apply “Inductive Approach” as a step

to teaching. The inductive approach refers to the style of introducing language

context containing the target rules where students can induce such rules through

the context and practical examples. In other words, the sequence in this approach

goes from creating a situation and giving examples to the generalization where

students should discover such generalization by themselves or with the teacher's

help. Mountone (2004) says that with an inductive approach, teachers show their

students a series of examples and non-examples, then, guide them toward noticing

a pattern and coming up with the generalization or concept rule. The inductive

approach, in its turn, moves from specific to general. The learners are first shown

many examples that contain a certain grammatical structure in different contexts

and they have to work out the rules by themselves. Next, the learners apply the

rules with various exercises and in different contexts to learn how they actually

work in real language use.

Based on the explanation above, the researcher wants to conduct research

entitled “Improving the ability of the seventh grade students of SMP NEGERI 19

PALU in using simple present tense through inductive approach”.

1.2 Problem Statement

Based on the background study above, the research problem in this study is

that “Can inductive approach improve the ability of the seventh grade students of

SMP NEGERI 19 PALU in using simple present tense”?

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1.3 Objective of the Research

Based on the research problem above, the objective of this research is to find

out the effectiveness of the inductive approach to teaching simple present tense at

the seventh grade students of SMP NEGERI 19 PALU the academic year of

2019/2020.

1.4 Significance of the Research

The result of this study gives some positive contributions to the English

learning context and may be beneficial for the researcher, students, teachers, and

the school.

 For the researcher

By doing this study, the researcher gets new experience and knowledge

about the study and hopefully, it will be useful in the future.

 For the students

This study may motivate students who have problems with grammar,

especially in the simple present tense. They also can conduct sentences in

simple present tense.

 For the teacher

The result of this study may help the teacher for using an Inductive

Approach to teach simple present tense. So, the students can be more

active and participate in making a decision about the rule of the simple

present tense.
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 For the school

This study can be a starting point to develop the teaching method that is

applied in the school.

1.5 Scope of the Research

This research focuses on teaching simple present tense in affirmative, negative

and interrogative sentences through an inductive approach.

1.6 Operational Definitions of Key Terms

- Teaching is the act to transfer knowledge from the teacher to the students.

- Simple present tense is one of the tenses that we use to talk about things

that are true in general and events that happen sometimes or all the time

(Murphy, 2001).

- Inductive Approach is one of the approaches that is efficient to teach

grammar. This approach leads the students to find out the grammatical

rules from an example that is given by the teacher (Ana and Ratmaningsih,

2012).