AN ANALYSIS ON THE GENDER-BASED DIFFERENCE OF THE EIGHT YEAR STUDENTS’ RECOUNT PARAGRAPH WRITING BASED ON THE GRAMMATICAL ERRORS AT SMPN 3 JENGGAWAH JEMBER

Abstract

SUMMARY An Analysis on the Gender-Based Difference of the Eight Year Students’ Recount Paragraph Writing Based on The Grammatical Errors at SMPN 3 Jenggawah Jember, Shofwan Hamid, 070210401084; 2012: 42s; English Education Program of Language and Arts Education department, the Faculty of Teacher Training and Education, Jember University.

In language learning, male students have lower ability as compared to female students. This occurrence is caused by the left hemisphere of girl’s brain develop more rapidly than that of a boy. This phenomenon also happens in SMPN 3 Jenggawah Jember. The results of this research showed that female students are better than male. Learning a different language is sometimes difficult since the target language has different elements compared to the native language. These differences sometimes cause students to make errors when using it. This research deals with grammatical error analysis. It describes the grammatical errors on recount paragraph writing made by the eight year female and male students of SMPN 3 Jenggawah Jember in the 2012/2013 academic year. The objective of this research was also to describe the difference between the eight year female and male students’ recount paragraph writing based on the grammatical errors at SMPN 3 Jenggawah Jember. I use the descriptive study of which the data were obtained from the students’ recount paragraph writing. Then these writings were analyzed by the researcher based on the grammatical errors. The grammatical errors were classified into six groups. They were errors in simple past tense, errors in the use of prepositions, errors in the use of conjunctions, errors in the use of articles, errors in the use of pronouns, and errors in noun pluralization. Cluster randomized sampling has been used in this research and the total number of the research respondents was 36 students of class VIII A at SMPN 3 viii

Jenggawah Jember in the 2012/2013 academic year. It consisted of 18 female students and 18 male students. This sample represents the research population, which were 112 eighth year students at SMPN 3 Jenggawah Jember. The data resources were also the English teacher of the eighth year students and the documentation that consisted of the list of the names of the eighth year students and the syllabus for SMP/MTs used by SMPN 3 Jenggawah Jember . The supporting data were collected by interview, documentation, and the main data was collected by writing tests. From the result highlighted in chapter IV, it can be concluded that the students made 106 grammatical errors which were classified into 46 errors in producing simple past tense, 12 errors in prepositions, 7 errors in the use of conjunctions, 11 errors in the use of articles, 11 errors in the use of pronouns, and 19 errors in noun pluralization. The results on the analysis showed that the female students were better than the male students in writing recount paragraph. From the six aspects of grammatical errors being analyzed by the researcher, it was found that there were 60 errors dealing with the grammatical errors on male students, while there were 46 errors dealing with the grammatical errors on female students. The highest percentage was in the use of simple past tense with 44% for female and 45% for male students. This case showed that the errors in both female and male students are the same. There is no significant difference; these are because the students did not apply the formula of simple past tense correctly. In the use of prepositions, the male students surpass the female students in making errors. The percentage is 4% for the female students and 16% for the male students. The same percentage happened in the use of conjunction with 6% for the female and the male students. The female students made more mistakes in using articles in their writing. It is showed that the percentage is 20% for the female students, while it was only 3% for male students. The rest of grammatical errors are the use of pronouns and noun pluralization. The female students were better than male students dealing with these, 8% and 11% in using pronouns. Then, in the use of noun pluralization the male students also produced more errors than male students. The percentage is 19% for the ix

male and 18% for the female students. The most significant difference happened that female student was better than male students dealing with the errors in the use of prepositions. Over all the male students produced more grammatical errors than female students. The results indicated that the VIII A students still encontered problems in writing a recount paragraph, with the number and percentage of errors produced by the male students was higher than that of the female students.