Students’ grammatical problems in writing essay at English Education Department of Halu Oleo University

Abstract

ABSTRACT

This research aimed to investigate grammatical mistakes and grammatical problems faced by students in writing essays at the English Education Department of Halu Oleo University in the year 2017. This research used a descriptive qualitative design. The respondents of this research were the students of the Writing III class (writing class A) of the English Education Department of Halu Oleo University which consisted of 10 students of 41 students. The researcher used purposive sampling in selecting participants as a sample. The instrument of this study was students’ writing essays to collect the data. In analyzing the data, the researcher used qualitative data analysis based on several steps, namely identifying, evaluating, interviewing, and concluding. The results of the study showed that the students had some mistakes in learning grammar. There were 217 total mistakes done by students in writing essays and those mistakes raised some problems. The problems faced by students in writing essays were subject-verb agreement, tenses, prepositions, and pronouns. The grammar problems were caused by some causes, such as they were limited knowledge in using grammar correctly and appropriately, they did not know about students are confused about using grammatical structure in their essay writing, first language transfer, and the carelessness of students when writing an essay.