The Students’ Ability And Difficulties In Composing Narrative Paragraphs

Abstract

A preliminary study conducted by the analyst has shown that composing narrative paragraphs is still considered difficult, which is in line with other studies that revealed that many students possessed low capability in composing a narrative paragraph. Hence, this study intended to discover the capability and describe their difficulties in writing a narrative paragraph, especially for the English Language Education Study Program students of ULM Banjarmasin Batch 2018. The analyst utilized a descriptive study with a quantitative along with qualitative approach with 98 students as population, and 51 students were chosen as a sample after implementing random cluster sampling, they were from Intermediate Writing Course. In contrast, a written test along with an interview was utilized as an instrument. The result showed that students’ capability in composing narrative paragraphs were 6 students (12%) in the excellent category, 8 students (16%) in the good category, 19 students (37.25%) in the fair category, and 18 students (35.29%) in the poor category, while the average score was 57.8 which classified as a fair category. Moreover, the difficulties faced by the students were due to possessing limited vocabulary, conducting grammatical errors (in prepositions, tenses, and articles), and also due to mechanics (i.e. spelling, capitalization, punctuation). Thus, it was suggested that they should improve their capability regarding vocabulary, mechanics, and grammar. This could be achieved by reading more books along with utilizing games as practice methods or techniques.