1.1 Background of the Study THE USE OF BEAUTY AND THE BEAST ILLUSTRATED VERSION AS NARRATIVE READING MATERIAL
English is important language. It is used by many people of the world to
communicate each other. It plays an important role in the process of
modernization as International language. This is why the Indonesian government
chooses English as the first foreign language to be taught in schools (Ramelan,
1992:3). By putting it as one of the subjects in the curriculum, hopefully students
will have an ability to use English and when they have mastered it they can get in
touch with the International community.
Recently from kindergarten to Senior High School, students learn English in
formal and non formal ways. They realize how important English in this life, so
they intend to master it such a way that they can use that language to
communicate with other people. In order to be good in mastering English,
students must master the four language skills; listening, speaking, reading and
writing.
Practically, it is not easy for students to read materials in a foreign language
because they have to face new vocabularies and structures that are different from
they have in their own language. They sometimes also have to face long, difficult,
boring and uninteresting passages both in the textbooks and the test papers. Those
things can make students frustrated and lose their motivation to learn English. The
reason for reading will finally simply only become learning to read instead of
reading to learn. Seeing this fact an English teacher should lead the students to
have desire for reading English text.
We read something because it interests us and it will be helpful for us. We
have different interest or reasons for reading. It depends on our purposes.
Although we have different reasons in reading, we actually do the same thing;
here we try to get the meaning of the messages in the texts. Teacher has to choose
the fresh and interesting one to be given in his/her students. Finnochiaro states
that helping the students comprehend the written material in the texts we are
using, we should give them the knowledge and the ability to be able to read other
material with ease and enjoyment.
From that situation, teacher should not remain passive or give up all efforts to
make improvements. According to William Grabe (in Simanjuntak, 1988:36),
briefly the role of the teacher is to facilitate reading, raise consciousness, build
confidence, ensure continuity and systematic, show involvement, and demand
performance. It means that the teachers should try to get the students to read and
to develop skills aimed at improving their ability to read. He/she should be able to
be a good facilitator in creating and building an effective reading class. One
beginning step for him/her to do is by providing understandable and interesting
materials. An understandable text will avoid students to translate it word by word,
and it will lead them to have a contextual understanding of a whole text, or at least
on sentence by sentence. The role of a teacher is important to help students in determining how much
and what subject the students should read. He/she must stimulate students’ interest
in reading and support their enthusiasm for books or other reading objects.
To enable the students master the four language skills, English teachers should
provide materials that are appropriate with the curriculum and find suitable
methods in teaching and learning process. One of methods suggested in the
approaches introduced by the government is by using visual aids as media in
classroom as stated by Kreidlen (1961:1) that visual aids can be useful to the
language teachers.
According to Gerlach and Elly (1980:254-255), to select appropriate media,
the teacher must consider the characteristics of the students, which directly related
to the learning process such as verbal abilities, visual and audio perception skills.
Other factors which teacher also ought to consider the media selection come from
the instructional system model, that is the organization of groups, the time
available and the space in which media will be used.
As a mater of fact, motivation has strong effect on student success or failure
in learning English. Students who are well motivated are more successful than
those who are not. What happens inside and outside the classroom plays
significant role in arising and maintaining student’s motivation and that fact
should not be neglected: on the contrary, it should be considered for the sake of
desired results.
1.2 Reasons for Choosing the Topic
The teaching of English at Junior High School and Senior High School aims at
developing the four language skills; listening, speaking, reading and writing.
From the four language skills stated above I only focused on the study of The Use
of Beauty and the Beast Illustrated Version as narrative reading material to teach
reading narrative. I used Beauty and the Beast Illustrated Version because of some
reasons as follows:
a. Generally students who are 11-14 years old like reading adventure stories,
tales of adult, hero tales, myths, and legend (Whiteland in Petty and Jensen,
1980:324).
b. By giving such material, hopefully the students will be motivated and
interested to read, if they practice reading a lot, perhaps they will be able to
comprehend other material easily.
c. Reading Beauty and the Beast Illustrated Version can enrich the student’ new
vocabulary, the structures of English sentences or improve their reading
development.
d. Learning English by using Beauty and the Beast Illustrated Version are
enjoyable since they contain good illustration pictures.
18.10
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