ABSTRACT

Mardi, Yasminia A. 2023. Students’ Ability in Writing Descriptive Text at First Grade of SMPIT Al-Khair Barabai. Sarjana’s Thesis. English Language Education Study Program, Faculty of Teachers’ Training and Education, Lambung Mangkurat University. The first advisor: Prof. Dr. H. Abdul Muth’im, M. Pd, the second advisor: Dr. Rina Listia, M. Pd

Keywords: ability, writing, descriptive text

Writing is a productive skill that should be learned by students and writing is the complex activity. Based in curriculum 2013, the students in junior high school are expected to learn various types of text in writing. One of them is descriptive text. The objective of this research is to know the students’ ability in writing descriptive text at first grade of SMPIT Al-Khair Barabai.

This research used descriptive quantitative method. The population of this research was the students of first grade at SMPIT Al-Khair Barabai. There were 46 students. The researcher used total population sampling technique. So, the samples of this research were all the students in the first grade of SMPIT Al-Khair Barabai. The researcher used writing test as the instrument of this research.

Based on the result, it showed that there were 6 students (13%) in very good category, 14 students (30%) in the good category, 15 students (33%) in fair category, and 11 students (24%) in poor category. It could be seen that average score for writing descriptive test is 66.01. This was categorized into fair. It was also indicated that the students’ problem in writing descriptive text were mainly in organization, grammar and mechanics. Many students were still unable to produce descriptive text independently. In order to increase students' interest in studying English, the teacher must be able to come up with interesting and effective teaching strategies. It is also suggested for the students to practice more and enrich their vocabulary in order to improve their ability to write the descriptive text by choosing the appropriate words.