ABSTRACT

Hidayat, Muhammad. 2021. Grammatical and Punctuation Problems of The Students of Intermediate Writing Class in Lambung Mangkurat University Banjarmasin. Sarjana’s Thesis. English Language Education, Faculty of Teachers Training and Education. Lambung Mangkurat University, Banjarmasin. Advisors: (1) Prof. Dr. Fatchul Mu’in, M.Hum., (2) Dr. Nanik Mariani, M.Pd.

Keywords: grammar, problem, punctuation, writing.

Writing is a crucial skill in school and university study. Eventually, students will write assignments in the form of a paragraph. Above all, good writing requires some aspects, such as grammar and vocabulary. However, in the discussion of grammar, the students often left out punctuation. Using proper punctuation is very important because it conveys meaning completely. This study aims to determine the grammatical and punctuation problems of the students of intermediate writing class in the English Language Education Study Program of Lambung Mangkurat University Banjarmasin.

The researcher uses a descriptive design in the quantitative approach. These research subjects are two classrooms in English Language Education Study Program that take Intermediate writing classes in English Language Education, Lambung Mangkurat University. In collecting data, the researcher used a students’ writing exercise.

The finding of this study was twelve errors found in grammatical errors. These are article, singular and plural, spelling, prepositions, verbs, determiner, pronoun, to vs too, quantifier, conjunction, and adverb. Meanwhile, in punctuation errors, there were six commonerrors, namely: comma, period, question mark, colon, apostrophe, and capital letters.

Therefore, it is suggested to English teachers may use the information of the types of students’ errors as guidance to evaluate the weakness or progress of the students’ ability in writing English, to minimize the students’ errors. The researcher also suggests students be more aware of using punctuation and grammar. The learners are expected to develop their writing proficiency to eliminate or at least reduce those errors.The researcher expects that this result of the study can inspire other researchers to conduct research related to grammatical and punctuation errors analysis to enrich the existing study.