ABSTRACT

Wulandari, Desymah. 2019. Students’ Ability in Writing Descriptive Text at the Eleventh Grade of SMAN 12 Banjarmasin. Sarjana’s Thesis. English Department, Faculty of Teacher Training and Education, Lambung Mangkurat University, Banjarmasin. The first advisor: Dr. Jumariati, M.Pd, the second advisor: Dr. Cayandrawati Sutiono, M.A.

Keywords: Writing, Descriptive Text, Ability

Writing is a productive and complex skill. Sometimes students feel that writing is difficult. They are confused to begin their word and organize their ideas. For those reasons, a teacher should be able to help the students dig their ideas in their mind. The purpose of this research was to find out the students’ ability in writing a descriptive text and factors that affect students’ ability in writing descriptive text at the eleventh grade of SMAN 12 Banjarmasin.

This research was designed as descriptive research. There were 84 students as the sample. Writing test and interview were used as the instrumentation. The students were asked to write a descriptive text based on the topics given and have to choose one as their topic. Meanwhile, the interview conducted with the English teacher and five students selected based on the result of the interpretation score.

In this research, the researcher analyzed and described the result of the students’ written test and the interview. The result showed that the highest percentage of students’ ability was in fair ability, there were 41.67% students from the total of the students. Next, there were 38.09% students had poor ability, 17.86% students had good ability, and 2.38% students had very good ability.

Meanwhile, the result from the interviews showed that the factors affecting the students’ ability were (1) the students did not like writing, (2) had difficulties to write their writing because they were lack of grammar and vocabulary mastery, and (3) the students also felt confused in writing.

 Therefore, it is suggested for the English teacher to make the lesson more interesting related to the topic of descriptive text to make the students interesting and motivate in writing descriptive text.