A STUDY OF THE SENTENCE PROBLEMS FOUND IN THE TEXTS WRITTEN BY THE EIGHTH YEAR STUDENTS OF SMPN 3 BANGSALSARI IN THE 2011/2012 ACADEMIC YEAR

Abstract

Writing is one of the important skills that should be mastered by the students, unfortunately most of the students still have problems in writing especially in writing good sentences. This research was intended to describe the eighth year students’ sentence problems in writing descriptive text and recount text. The research was conducted at SMPN3 Bangsalsari which was chosen by purposive method with the following consideration: (1) it was possible to get permission from the headmaster to do research in this school, (2) this school needed data about the students’ sentence problems in their writings (a descriptive text and recount text). The subjects of the research were the eighth year students of SMPN 3 Bangsalsari in the 2011/2012 academic year. They were divided into four classes, VIII A, VIII B, VIII C, and VIII D. In this research, the researcher used purposive sampling method to determine the respondents. The researcher took six students from each class which consisted of two high achiever students in English, two moderate achiever students in English, and two low achiever students in English by using UAS score of English as the classification. Therefore, there were 24 students of eighth year as the subjects. The main data were collected by using writing test. The students were given three topics for each text and they were asked to choose one topic to write a descriptive text and a recount text in the form of a short essay in 40 minutes for each text. Each text should consist of at least 2 paragraphs and each paragraph consists of 5-10 sentences. The students’ writing text were analyzed by identifying and coding the sentence problems, classifying and listing the sentence problems into four categories namely sentence fragments, comma splices, run-on sentences, and grammatical problems. Then, the sentence problems found were calculating to find out the percentage of each indicator. Based on the results of the data analysis, it was found that among the four indicators, the highest percentage of sentences problems found in the students’ writing was grammatical problems with 70 problems (41.6%) in descriptive text and 137 problems (60.6%) in the recount text. Then, it was followed by sentence fragments with 67 problems (39.9%) in descriptive text and 60 problems (26.6%) in the recount text and run-on sentences with 22 problems (13.1%) in descriptive text and 18 problems (7.9%) in the recount text, while comma splices as the least sentence problems found in the students’ writing had 9 problems (5.4%) in descriptive text and 11 problems (4.9%) in the recount text. This might occur because the effect of the students’ knowledge of their native language or interlingual transfer and the overgeneralization of the students’ knowledge of English or intralingual transfer. Thus, it needed more practice for the students to become good writers.