The implementation of scientific approach in the teaching of English to Junior High School students

Curriculum is the main part of an education system. It becomes the guidelines for teachers to understand what they should achieve in teaching and learning process, while for students, curriculum becomes their guidance to know what they should reach in the learning process. Curriculum always develops because of some needs of the country. Indonesia’s curriculum is also developed and the recent curriculum is Curriculum 2013 which applies to the teaching learning processes. In fact, there are some teachers who still get confused of how to apply Scientific Approach to their teaching learning process. Now the minister of education run two curriculum, the Curriculum 2013 and School Based Curriculum. In brief, Curriculum 2013 is still hard to be understood and utilized well in Indonesia. To overcome the problems, the researcher went to the field to collect the information about the implementation of Scientific Approach and the problems of the implementing Scientific Approach. In this study, the writer attempted to understand deeply the process of implementing Scientific Approach in teaching of English to junior high school students. The writer involved the seventh and the eighth grade students and two English teachers of a private junior high school in Surabaya as the subjects of her study. In order to know the process and the problems of implementing Scientific Approach to junior high school students, the writer did the field research. In her study, she collected the research data through collecting the teachers’ lesson plans, doing non-participant observation, interviewing some the students and the two teachers. The analysis on the collected data resulted in essential findings. First, the two teachers under observation had already implemented Scientific Approach well. Due to its nature, the implementation of Scientific Approach made the students involved more actively and enjoyably in the classroom activities. Second, there were some problems beyond the implementation of Scientific Approach, namely there were too many basic competencies to be covered in one semester; the limited teaching-learning facilities available at school made the teachers find it difficult in preparing the teaching-learning media; the teacher who was lack of comprehensive knowledge on Curriculum 2013 found it more difficult in understanding the depth of the basic competencies and achievement indicators; the students who are in the low level find it more difficult to follow the learning process using Scientific Approach; the students who were shy and afraid to be active chose to be quite and did not take a part in the communicating step; the class which was noisy during the teaching learning activities were harder to be managed; the teacher who was lack comprehensive sometimes applied the teacher centred learning; and the students who did not want to do the exercises chose to avoid to be involved in a group discussion