The holistic evaluation of Argumentative essays in east java essay writing competition held by English Letters Students Association (ELSA) 2005 the State Islamic University Of Malang

ABSTRACT

Among other means of communication, writing still plays a great role in communication, the major purpose of which is to communicate a useful message. The writer expresses something through their uses of language; they can comment to their readers. Writing composition is hard word, because the writer must anticipate the reactions of a reader that cannot hear or see. Organization of ideas or strategies of development of ideas will help US achieve the goal we set for ourselves. Argumentative essay is one of various types of essay, and it is ٦ considered as the most difficult one. In this type of essay, rhetorical skill of the writer in giving evidence and refuting opposing arguments play a great role in determining the quality of essay.

Related to those phenomenon, research problem are explored, namely how the holistic evaluation of argumentative essays in East Java essay writing competition held by English Letters Students Association (ELSA) 2005 The State Islamic University of Malang. Therefore, the purpose of this study is to know their argument by using holistic evaluated method. It is based on five compositions, namely: 1) Content, 2) Organization, 3) Vocabulary, 4) Language use, and 5) Mechanics.

This study applied descriptive qualitative research design. After finding and reading the data, the researcher selected the data based on the research problem by classifying the data. Finally, the researcher conducted and analyzed the collected data and make conclusions. From each composition are categorized into four mastery levels, those are; excellent to very good, good to average, fair to poor and very poor.

The discussion reveals that content composition is sufficiently good, because for eight competitors, there are three competitors got the criteria fair to poor. For organization composition, it is good because most of the competitors have fluent expression and well organize. Meanwhile, in the vocabular composition, the words or idioms choice and usage is effectively, it is very good. Moreover, there are no competitors got fair to poor criteria. Next, is the common mistake, it is language use composition. In this composition most of the competitors have mistakes, especially in basic agreement, effective complex construction and verb tense. The last composition is mechanics. Mechanically, there are many competitors careless in spelling and using punctuation, especially comma (,) and punctuation mark (?).

From those findings, It is very important to the teacher in giving emphasize, especially in organization, Language use and punctuation. It is because many competitors got bad result in those compositions.