English department students, especially in State University of Malang are required to gain 146 credits to reach a bachelor degree. This means that every single student has to pass the entire courses given by the department. The courses consist of four language skills, reading, listening, writing, and speaking. These courses are modified and classified based on the level, the basic to the advance one. The fact that writing course is essential for students, our department organizes to modify writing course into three courses which are paragraph writing, essay writing and argumentative writing. The writing course which is given to the sophomore in the second year is the essay writing. Essay writing is the course to develop student ability to write expository essays using different method of development: examples, details, chronological order, comparison and contrast, cause and effect relations, as well as division and classification (English department book guideline). This course deals with writing in more than five paragraphs which consist of introductory, body, and conclusion paragraph. Writing in the large amount of words must be difficult to achieve. Therefore, the lecturers may find several errors come about the students’ paper. The purpose of this essay is to analyze the students’ error in writing the essay that can be classified from grammar aspect, three of which are frequently happen: the use of tenses, the use of article, and the use of subject and verb agreement.
Firstly, we have a deal with the inconsistent use of the tenses. As we observe, we find that in the essay writing students might be confused in using tenses. Tenses are the basic of grammar focus. The use of tenses is accomplished in such a condition which is influenced by time. Present, past, and future are three kinds of tenses that we usually use in our essay writing. Students are inconsistent to use it when they face the ambiguous circumstance that difficult to be analyzed whether use a particular tense or another one. For instance, when we talk about something in the present, usually we get a mistake in the consistency of using present tense. “Both two systems of education also required and…” In this case, we must change required become require because previously the writer use present tense. Thus, in the following sentences, the writer must use the present tense as well. This means that we should focus on the matter what we deal with. Therefore, our writing essay will be better without any inconsistent in the tenses.
Secondly, we have a deal with the lack use of article. In our identification, mostly, our mistakes are overlooking the article when we discuss about singular and plural things. Unlike native English, who can intuit the appropriate times to use each article in their own writing, students who learn English as their second language lack the years of understanding English that is required to develop that intuition for grammar use. Students usually are not aware about the use of article. They usually forget to put article a/an in singular forms that not a specific object, one of a number of the same objects and article “the” in specific object that both the person speaking and the listener know. For example, “Public school has the strict regulation in time and place.” In this case, the writer should focus in the use of article. He/she is supposed to put article “a” before public school instead of nothing. The lack use of article obviously finds in the students’ paper. Because of the fact that it is actually simple mistake, the students should increase their awareness of it as well. Thus, their writing essay will improve without any mistake of the lack use of article.
Lastly, we are going to thrash out about the wrong use of subject and verb agreement. Subjects and verbs must agree with one another in number (singular or plural). If a subject is singular, its verb must also be singular; if a subject is plural, its verb must also be plural. In the present tense, nouns and verbs form plurals in opposite ways: nouns add an s to the singular form; verbs remove the s from the singular form. For instance, as we find it in one of the student assignment, his error happens in this sentence “the government believe that Indonesia students can reach the high position of world students’ average intelligence.” He should add –s after believe because government is singular noun and should be attached by singular verb. Therefore, teaching students to anticipate these common grammar errors involving subject verb agreement will heighten their awareness of sentence constructions as well as anticipate other problems involving sentence structure.
Based on elucidation above, we can construe that the students mostly have the difficulty in writing essay. Those are the structure of the writing, the content of the writing, and the grammar use in writing. Many students feel that those problems are the crux problematic in the writing class. The lecturer should be aware of those problems so that he/she can find the method that can be used to solve the problems effectively. This means that lectures should prepare ample examples in advance for students to practice correcting before writing their next essays.
Written by
Bila Nastiti T
Orista Vella A
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