CHAPTER I

INTRODUCTION

This chapter presents the fundamental reason for conducting the study. It covers research background, research problem, research objective, scope and limitation, research significance, the definition of key terms. Each point is presented as follows:

1.1 Research Background

The condition of living in a digital culture is called as digitality. Aspects of digitality include the people who use the internet and technology to find information such as through search engine and communicate through web blogs and email. Prensky (2001) argues that there are two groups of society “Digital

Natives and Digital Immigrants”.

Digital natives are people who are born in the digital era. They are one of the modern people who could not live without mobile phone. They became an individual and addicted to the mobile phone where they always check the phone every time. In contrast, the digital natives have different behavior from digital immigrant. According to Tapscott (2009), there are many characteristics of digital natives such as freedom, customization, scrutiny, integrity, collaboration, entertainment, speed, and innovation.

Digital immigrants are people who are born before the existence of digital technologies. They tend to have no social account and no email account. Digital immigrants prefer direct communication or face to face meeting compared to its counterpart. Reading papers, magazines, and documents are done manually, they

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seldom interact with the screen and online technology. However, it is possible for them to integrate technology into daily life.

Technology has completely changed the way people live. Knowing about gadget at a very early age children become more digitally and create a new culture using online communication than do in person. For this reason, all aspects of our lives have changed such as in the world of education. Many teachers use technology to support the learning process. Besides, students can search about anything in their mobile phone. By using technology, teachers and students have a variety of learning tools at their fingertips.

Empirically, there have been many researchers that have already done the research about Digitality Level. One of them is Wijaya (2011) who did the research about “A Study on Digitality Levels of Elementary School English

Teachers in SDN Dawuhan Sengon I Purwodadi, ”, she found that the digitality levels of Elementary school English teachers in SDN Dawuhan Sengon I

Purwodadi – Pasuruan was “Fair” because most of them got score 55-69.

The second researcher found that the digitality levels of students in SMAN

1 Sampang Madura were “High”. This results of the research found by Irsyad

(2011) in the research “A Study on Digitality Levels of High School Student in

SMAN 1 Sampang Madura”.

The third researcher is Permana (2012) in his research entitled “A Study on

The Digitality Levels of Senior High School Students at MA Muhammadiyah 01

Malang”, it is found that the digitality levels of senior high school students at MA

Muhammadiyah 01 were 80.4. It means that they were categorized in

“High”.

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The last researcher is Agusti study (2011) in the research of “A Study on

The Digitality Levels of State of Junior High School English Teachers in

Kab.Malang”, the study found that the digitality levels of state of junior high school English teachers in Malang were “high”. The mean score of the

English teachers was 76.4.

This research looks similar to Agusti (2011) ) in the research of, “A Study on The Digitality Levels of State of Junior High School English Teachers in

Kab.Malang”, the difference of this research is done in Tulungagung Regency and at different level of education t