E-ISSN 2621-0703
P-ISSN 2528-6250
Jurnal Muara Pendidikan Vol.
3 No.
AN ANALYSIS OF PROBLEMS FACED BY FIRST YEAR
STUDENTS OF STKIP MUHAMMADIYAH MUARO BUNGO
IN WRITING CAUSE AND EFFECT ESSAY
Arini Kumala Sari STKIP Muhammadiyah Muara Bungo Email: arinikumalasari1@gmail.
ABSTRACT
The purpose of this article is to present the result of a study conducted to describe analysis of problem faced by first year students of STKIP Muhammadiyah Muaro Bungo in writing cause and effect essay.
This study wasa descriptive research design.
This research conducted by involving all students of first year students of English Program Study of STKIP Muhammadiyah Muaro Bungo academic year 2017/2018.
Instrument of research were writing test and The findings showed that the students got low score in writing cause and effect essay.
It was shown that 16 students ( 88,89%) had difficulties in writing cause and effect essay.
There were 12 students .
,67%) had difficulties in organizing ideas, 16 students .
,89%) had difficulties in using correct grammar, 10 students ( 55,56%) had difficulties in using appropriate words, 14 students ( 77,77% ) had difficulties in using transition goal, 9 students ( 50 % ) had difficulties in using mechanics.
The causes of this problem were Interlingua transfer, intralingua transfer and vocabulary.
Thus, the researchers expect that the writing lecturers are able to give good writing technique, and the students can do more exercises to increase their skill in writing.
Key words: Writing, cause and effect essay
ABSTRAK
Tujuan dari artikel ini adalah untuk menunjukkan hasil dari penelitian dari analisis masalah yang dihadapi mahasiswa tingkat pertama STKIP MUhammadiyah MUara Bungo dalam menulis esai cause and effect.
Penelitian ini adalah penelitian deskriptif.
Penelitian ini dilakukan dengan melibatkan semua mahasiswa tahun pertama dari program studi bahasa inggris STKIP Muhammadiyah Muara BUngo tahun akademin 2017/2018.
Instrumen penelitian adalah tes menulis dan wawancara.
Temuan penunjukkan bahwa mahasiswa mendapatkan nilai yang rendah dalam menulis esai cause and effect.
Temuan ini menunjukkan 16 orang mahasiswa .
,89%) memiliki kesulitan dalam menulis esai cause and effect.
Ada 12 orang mahasiswa .
,67%) yang memiliki kesulitan dalam menyusun ide, 16 orang mahasiswa .
,89%) memiliki kesulitan dalam mengunakan tatabahasa yang benar, 10 orang mahasiswa .
,56%) mengalami kesulitan dalam mengunakan kosakata yang tepat, 14 orang mahasiswa .
,77%) memiliki kesulitan dalam mengunakan transisi, 9 orang mahasiswa .
%) memiliki kesulitan dalam mengunakan mekanis.
Penyebab dari masalah tersebut adalah transfer interlingua, transfer intralingua, kosakata.
Jadi, peneliti berharap dosen yang mengajar matakuliah writing bisa memberikan stkip-mmb.
id/index.
php/mp E-ISSN 2621-0703
P-ISSN 2528-6250
Jurnal Muara Pendidikan Vol.
3 No.
teknik yang baik dan mahasiswa dapat melakukan banyak latihan untuk meningkatkan kemampuan menulisnya.
Kata Kunci: Menulis, esai cause dan effect
INTRODUCTION
Writing plays an important role for students who are in the process of learning a language.
is one of the productive skills, besides speaking, which involves process of transferring ideas into According to Sapkota .
, writing is an activity of putting down the graphic symbols which has a function to present a language in order to convey some meaning, thus, the reader can grasp the information.
Nunan .
3: .
also states that writing is a process of thinking to invent ideas, thinking about how to express ideas into good writing, and arranging the ideas clearly.
In addition, writing is an essential thing to gain success in high school, college and job.
It is usually needed by students to pass their educational institution.
Writing has become one of the tests in AuUjian Akhir Sekolah (UAS) beside other skills like reading and listening at senior Whereas university, they are required to write essays, tests, reports, paper and thesis during their studies.
Writing skill is also necessary in writing formal application letters in applying for job or graduate In other words, writing has been identified as threshold skill for getting success in academic field as well as job Considering important of writing.
English Department STKIP Muhammadiyah Muaro Bungo has made it as one of compulsory subjects that should be mastered by the students.
The departments provided several series of writing English Paragraph Writing.
English Essay Writing, and Paper Writing that are offered in different semester.
According to Oshima and Hogue .
6: .
, essay is a piece of writing which consists of several paragraphs that cover of introductory, body and concluding Crews ( 2.
also states that an essay is as a fairly brief piece of nonfiction that tries to make a point in an interesting Thus.
Essay is a collection of several paragraphs that convey ideas or point in an interesting One of the common patterns of essay organization is called cause and effect essay.
Oshima and Hogue .
6: .
states that cause and effect is a form of writing that discuss the causes .
for something, the effects .
, or both.
Writing cause and effect essay is the simplest essay pattern or organization, however, there were only few students who are proficient at writing it.
stkip-mmb.
id/index.
php/mp E-ISSN 2621-0703
P-ISSN 2528-6250
Jurnal Muara Pendidikan Vol.
3 No.
According to the data takes English Essay Writing assignment score of 18 students of STKIP Muhammadiyah Muaro Bungo, 2 students .
,11%) got excellent score with minimum correction, 5 students .
,77%) got good score with some correction, and 8 students ( 44,44%) got average score with changing several sentences in paragraphs and contents, and 3 students ( 16,66%) got low score with changing whole paragraphs and Writing cause and effect essay is the simplest pattern / There are several problems that can be found in process of writing cause and effect essay.
According to Brown .
, students had difficulty in organizing of idea, using correct grammar, choosing The difficulties faced by According to Brown .
, the studentsAo error in writing are influenced by two major causes.
He states that interlingual transfer is a significant source of error for all learners.
He explains that interlanguage is learner language, which emphasizes the language learnersAo system.
also defines interlingual as a system that has a structurally intermediate status between the native and target language.
Interlingual is when the students structure deviation by the effect of their mother tongue.
In other words, it is called language The difficulties occur because the features of source language and target language are The second cause that can cause studentsAo difficulties and errors in writing is intralingual (Brown, 2000:.
Intralingual derives when the students make ungrammatical structure since they do not have enough knowledge of their target Intralingual errors result from faulty or partial learning of the target language rather than Namely, learners make mistakes because they do not know the target language very well, and have difficulties in using the target It can be said that students have lack knowledge of the target language.
One of them is lack of grammar knowledge of the target language.
As Richard and Renandya .
state Augrammar is too important to be ignored, and without a good knowledge of grammar, learnersAo language development will be severely constrainedAy.
It means that the use of correct grammar will influence the sense of studentsAo writing in order to catch readers interesting with the story that the students tell.
Besides two causes above, another cause that made students got difficulty in writing is lack of Lack of vocabulary stkip-mmb.
id/index.
php/mp E-ISSN 2621-0703
P-ISSN 2528-6250
Jurnal Muara Pendidikan Vol.
3 No.
become uninteresting, and boring (Farooq, et al.
, 2012:.
Lack of cannot express their ideas.
They do not know what words they have to use to put their thought in their Also, because of lack of vocabulary, the students use the same words in different context.
This condition will affect the studentsAo writing quality, because the choice of words in writing will influence the content of their Readers will get difficulties to understand and comprehend studentsAo writing because the words that are used will influence the meaning of the writing.
Based on the phenomenon above, the researcher interested to do research on the analysis of problem faced by the first year students of STKIP MB in writing cause and effect essay.
The researcher focused on the problem faced in writing cause and effect essay by the first year students of English Department of STKIP 2017/2018.
METHOD OF THE RESEARCH
This descriptive research that used Gay .
states that quantitative approaches are used to describe current conditions, investigates relationships, and study causeeffect phenomena.
The subject of the research was the first year students of English Department of STKIP MB academic year 2017/2018.
There were 18 students which involve in this research.
stkip-mmb.
id/index.
php/mp The instruments were writing test and interviews.
The writing test was used to find out the studentsAo difficulties in writing cause and effect essay.
In addition, the interviews used to support the result of the findings.
Before doing the test, the validity of the test was Content validity was used to find out the validity of the test.
Gay .
says that Content validity is the degree of which a test measures an intended content So, the test that was used must be relevant with studentsAo The researcher asked the students to choose one of the topics from some topics given.
Then, the topics that were chosen by students were used as topics for cause and effect essay test.
To see the reliability of the test, the researcher used interrater technique.
There were two The first assessor was Assessor 1 and the second assessor was Assessor 2.
calculate the correlation coefficient of the scores given by two assessors the researcher used Pearson Product Moment Formula (Gay, 1987:.
as Follow Finally, the researcher used correlation based on Arikunto .
E-ISSN 2621-0703
P-ISSN 2528-6250
Jurnal Muara Pendidikan Vol.
3 No.
81 Ae 1.
00 : Very high 61 Ae 0.
80 : High 41 Ae 0.
60 : Enough 21 Ae 0.
40 : Low 00 Ae 0.
20 : Very low Where: P = percentage F = frequency N = Total sample researcher used writing test to get the data.
The procedures of gathering data were as follows:
The researcher asked students to do the writing test on a piece of paper and chose one of the The studentsAo writing The researcher copied the studentAos writing and gave one copy to assessor 1 and another for assessor 2 The studentsAo writing one by one The assessors gave check to the kinds of difficulties faced by students using the table in Appendix 1 The whether the students had a difficulties or not based on these criteria in Appendix 1 The students are said that they have problem if the percentage above 50% and they have no difficulties if the percentage less than 50%.
FINDING AND DISCUSSION
Based on the results of the data analysis and findings of this concludes the result of the research, as follows StudentsAo Ability in Writing Cause and Effect Essay Based on the result of the data analysis, the researcher found that 16 students .
,89%) out of 18
Students had difficulties in writing cause and effect essay, and 2
,11%)
In short, almost all of the students got difficulties in writing this kind of essay.
researcher did the following steps:
The researcher checked the table that indicates the studentsAo difficulties on each aspect of writing cause and effect essay The researcher listed the students difficulties on each components of writing cause and effect essay by using the formula below StudentsAo Problems Writing Cause and Effect Essay Based on the data analysis, it was found that the students got difficulties in writing cause and effect essay such as organizing transition signal and mechanics.
(See appendix .
The data also shown on the diagram above.
Diagram 1.
Percentation of students difficulties in writing cause and effect essay stkip-mmb.
id/index.
php/mp E-ISSN 2621-0703
P-ISSN 2528-6250
Jurnal Muara Pendidikan Vol.
3 No.
First, difficulties in organizing ideas.
Based on the data of studentsAo test, it was found that students have poor ability in organizing It was proven by the data that the students did mistakes 66,67% in organizing ideas.
means that 12 students have problem in organizing ideas.
They did not understand how to organize the idea.
It started from the thesis statement.
Their statement didnAot meet the proper didnAot understand how to create the good thesis statement.
Finally, they could not organize and guide their ideas into a good cause and effect essay.
The second finding was 16 students .
,89%) had difficulties in using appropriate grammar.
mean that some students still had problems in using grammar.
They had difficulties in using active or passive sentences, tenses, the Subject-verb comma or colon, lack of parallel sentences, prepositions, incorrect noun number, incorrect phrasing, conjunctions, determiner, modifier.
Most to their essay just translated the Indonesia version into English version.
So, the readers canAot understand what the writer is trying to say.
Next, there were 10 students .
,56%) There were some informal words, inappropriate transisison, misused word, redundancy that mention on the essay.
It means that some students were not able to use the appropriate words as it is.
Readers are not able to focus to the meaning of the essay.
Another problem that should be considered in writing cause and effect essay is the use of transition signal.
Based on the result of the data analysis it was found that 14 students out of 18 students .
,77%) had difficulties in using appropriate transition It means that more than half students did not understand in using transition signal.
Some of studentsAo writing canAot guide their explanation from the cause to the effect of the topic given.
stkip-mmb.
id/index.
php/mp Diagram 1.
Percentation of students difficulties in writing cause and effect essay
E-ISSN 2621-0703
P-ISSN 2528-6250
Jurnal Muara Pendidikan Vol.
3 No.
Last, the researcher found that 9 students .
%) had difficulties in using mechanics.
means that some students still had problem how to use They were not able to using appropriate punctuation, gerund, pronoun, and spelling.
They usually confused to put gerund because they didnAot understand how to use that in the Most of the studentsAo writing contained of misspelling.
was seem that there were no revising stage on the writing process that the students done.
The data shown that there were many problems made by the students in writing cause and effect essay.
Almost 88,89 % of the students got difficulties in writing cause and effect essay.
There were many mistake made by the students.
It made the researches continue the research to find the reason of the mistake.
Causes of StudentsAo Problem in Writing Cause and Effect Essay There were some causes that made students got difficulties in writing cause and effect essay.
The first cause is interlingual Interlingual transfer is one of important factor that make students difficult to write their ideas because the features of Indonesia language is really different from English.
From the data analysis, it was found that there were 91% students did interlingual transfer in their writing.
They translated word by word into English.
The different structure between Indonesia and English stkip-mmb.
id/index.
php/mp make students got confused when they wanted to transfer their ideas into written form.
The way of students use Indonesia influence their way in using English.
Because of this different language structures, students got difficulties when they tried to use English in the real form.
The next cause of studentsAo difficulties in writing cause and effect essay was intralingual Based on the data, all of students did grammar errors in their writing.
Students did many errors in choosing correct action verb, linking verb, pronoun and using correct simple past tense.
Their lack understanding about grammar made their writing became mess and their writing was difficult to be understood by There are several causes of studentsAo difficulties in writing cause and effect.
Those are The different structure made the ideas transferred several times.
CONCLUSION
AND
SUGGESTION
Based on the research question and findings in the previous chapter, this study revealed that the first students of STKIP MB had problems in writing cause and effect essay.
It was proven that 16 students out of 18 students had problems in writing There were 12 students .
,67%) had difficulties in organizing ideas, 16 students .
,89%) had difficulties in using correct grammar, 10 students ( E-ISSN 2621-0703
P-ISSN 2528-6250
Jurnal Muara Pendidikan Vol.
3 No.
55,56%) had difficulties in using appropriate words, 14 students ( 77,77% ) had difficulties in using transition goal, 9 students ( 50 % ) Then, the causes of this problem were Interlingua transfer, intralingua transfer and Thus, researchers expect that the writing lecturers are able to give good students can do more exercises to increase their skill in writing.
REFERENCES