Scientific literacy is an important issue in education today to face 21st century challenges which emphasize critical thinking, analytical skill, creativity, innovation skill, communication and collaboration. Therefore science teaching should provide students with these abilities. However, unfortunately most teaching methods in physics lessons are typically teacher centered and rote-learning based to enhance students' ability to answer the National Examination Test which focuses on basic skills, and memorization of formulas. However, the PISA tests, as an international assessment of scientific literacy, examine the student's ability to apply the knowledge gained to solve problems that he or she has not seen or solved before. The purpose of this research is to explore the phenomenon of building students' scientific literacy in the Indonesian context.

The methodological approach of this study was classroom action research, which emphasizes analyzing students' answers in particular topics in physics. This research was conducted in the science class of grade XI in Sukma Bangsa School. The teacher as a researcher delivered contextual teaching learning to enhance students' scientific literacy. The topics were gravity, simple harmonic motion, work and energy. The students' understanding were examined with the non-routine problem set. The way that student answered questions would reflect their conceptual understanding in physics. The students' scientific literacy level was assessed with the Bybee scale.

From this research, it was revealed that most of the students' understanding of physics was quite low. According to the Bybee scale, most of the students' scientific literacy level was nominal scientific literacy, while some students were still at the scientifically Illiterate level. The students answered the physics questions based on their memorization not based on their conceptual understanding. Some of them used the "Plug and Chug" method and referred to the previous example. Students also could not explain the qualitative questions which explained cause and effect.

This study reveals that students have a lack of scientific literacy because there are so many basic problems in building students' scientific literacy, especially the basic skills in learning science, such as reading and basic math. The school should make a special program to improve the students' ability in basic math and reading. In addition, science teachers should give a rich text problem to accustom students to solving problems using conceptual understanding. They also should start giving high order thinking skill questions in order to build the students' conceptual understanding.