An Evaluation on The Compositions written by the students of English Letters and Language Department of UIN Maulana Malik Ibrahim Malang

ABSTRACT

Making a good writing in fact is not an easy thing for most students in university. It is proven by the reality that majority of students’ writing found around are not well arranged, or in another word, they are not well-written paragraph. What makes them not well-written among others is because the students only ‘put’ and ‘stick’ the information in their writing irregularly without thinking whether their ideas have been coherently linked each other or not. Not only that, most students also pay no attention to the meaning relationship of their sentences so that it makes their readers difficult to get the idea. Knowing that this phenomenon often happens, and many students still do the same mistakes, the researcher finally feels interested to conduct a research on writing compositions, which are written by students of English Letters and Language Department of UIN Maulana Malik Ibrahim Malang.

In this research, there are two main problems that are investigated by the researcher, they are: (1) what are the types of grammatical mistakes used by the students of UIN Maulana Malik Ibrahim Malang in their writing?, (2) how do the students of English Letters and Language Department of UIN Maulana Malik Ibrahim Malang organize the paragraph writings?, and (3) how do the students of English Letters and Language Department of UIN Maulana Malik Ibrahim follow the standard of academic writing

Additionally, in conducting this research, the researcher uses a descriptive qualitative research method to analyze the data. The data are taken from the words, phrase, clause, sentence, or paragraphs containing the types of grammatical mistakes and the types of compositions paragraph. Furthermore, in collecting the data, the researcher does several steps. First, she read the whole compositions written by the students of English Letters and Language Department of UIN Maulana Malik Ibrahim Malang. Second, she continued with observing the compositions written by the students of English Letters and Language Department of UIN Maulana Malik Ibrahim Malang. After observing the compositions, the researcher continued with selecting the up to ones. Next, the researcher takes notes on the types of grammatical mistakes and violations of composition paragraphs found. The last, the researcher classifies the data based on their types and then analyze them by using the theory of grammar by Betty Schrampfer Azar (1999) and kinds of writing by John Langan (2006).

Based on the data analyzed, it is found that the students make both Grammatical mistakes and some types of compositions, such as tenses, auxiliary or modal verb, pronouns, subject-verb agreement, conjunction, conditional sentence, gerunds, infinitives, active and passive voice, parallel structure, reference, preposition, phrases, clauses, and sentences, while the types of compositions such as descriptive, narrative, argumentative, and expository paragraph. Not only that, the researcher also found that the most widely grammatical mistake is subject-verb agreement. At the same time, in the compositions analyzed, the researcher also found that some students are not well written paragraph in writing compositions because they still do some grammatical mistakes in the paragraph. In terms of coherence, the researcher found the inappropriate use of pronoun, transitional signals, and illogic order. Those are the things that make the sentences and paragraphs in the writing could not follow the standard of academic writing.