The Sentence Fallacies in the Narrative Writing: A Descriptive Study of Gender Differences at Senior High School

Abstract

Writing is often considered as the most difficult skill for students. It happens because the students have to master so many aspects in writing. One of the difficulties that the students face in writing is creating complete sentences. Problems occur when the sentence form is incorrect. The common types of sentence fallacies or sentence problems that usually made by the students are sentence fragments, comma splices, and run-on sentences (Guffey & Seefer, 2010). Furthermore, one of the sociocultural factors shaped by learners in the process of learning a language including writing is gender (Kamari, Gorjian, & Pazhakh, 2012). In other words, gender differences in using language can be revealed through writing skill. Dealing with those problems, the researcher intended to conduct a descriptive study on the tenth grade male and female students’ sentence fallacies in their narrative writings. This research intended to know and to describe the kinds of the sentence fallacies made by the tenth grade male and female students of SMAN 1 Jember in their narrative writings and the percentages of the sentence fallacies. The research design of this research was Descriptive Study. The data of this research consisted of the main data and the supporting data. The main data were the documents of the students’ writings and the supporting data were obtained from semi-structured interview with the Tenth Grade English Teacher of SMAN 1 Jember to get the information about the students’ learning process of writing and the difficulties that the students face in writing a narrative writing. There were 28 students’ writings given by the English teacher. It consisted of 14 female writings and 14 male writings that were analyzed by the researcher.