A DESCRIPTIVE STUDY OF THE EIGHTH GRADE STUDENTS’ ABILIT IN WRITING A SIMPLE NARRATIVE PARAGRAPH BASED ON SEMI-GUIDED TASK AT MTs WAHID HASYIM KUNIR IN THE ACADEMIC YEAR 2010/2011

Abstract

In Indonesia English is taught as a compulsory subject, especially for junior and senior high school students. There are four skills that should be mastered by the students, namely listening, speaking, reading and writing. Many learners regard writing as the most difficult and complicated skill, because they should consider some aspect such as grammar, vocabulary, organization, and mechanics. This research was a descriptive research that intended to describe the eighth grade students’ ability in writing a simple narrative paragraph and the students’ ability in the aspect of grammar, vocabulary, organization, and mechanic. It was conducted at MTs Wahid Hasyim Kunir which chosen by purposive method. The respondents of the research were taken by population method, because total students of the eighth grade at MTs Wahid Hasyim Kunir were less than 100. The problem of the research was “How is the eight grade students’ ability in writing a simple narrative paragraph based on semi-guided task at MTs Wahid hasyim Kunir in the academic year 2010/2011?” and then, this general problem was broken down into each aspects of writing to describe the students’ ability in each aspect of writing. The data of this research was collected by conducting writing test. The test was in the form of semi-guided test in which the students were asked to write nine past tense sentences based on the picture series given. Then, they should organize their sentences into a good order narrative paragraph by using connector words. The students’ writings were analyzed by two scorers. Both scorers analyzed the students’ writings in the aspect of grammar, vocabulary, organization, and mechanic based on analytical writing rubric. The data taken was presented in the form of mean score to answer the general problem of the research. Besides, the data was also presented in the form of frequency distribution to answer the specific research problem. The result of the students’ narrative paragraph writing test showed that the eighth grade students’ ability in writing a simple narrative paragraph based on semi-guided task at MTs Wahid Hasyim Kunir in general was 43.9. it meant that their abilty in categorized as poor. Based on the students’ classification of the score level, it was known that 3 students were in fair category (3%), 4 students were in fail category (4%), and 79 students were in poor category (93%). Based on the students’ classification score in each aspect of writing, it can be concluded that the most serious problem was Mechanic. The students did not use their knowledge of mechanic when they wrote a paragraph. This problem was followed by the other aspects of writing, such as organization, grammar, and vocabulary.