GRAMMATICAL DIFFICULTIES FACED BY SECOND LANGUAGE (L2) LEARNERS IN WRITING SENTENCES

Abstract

This research deals with the grammatical difficulties faced by students in their English writing sentences. It begins from L2 students that complains English Grammar as one of the complicated features in writing, especially the students from English Department of IAIN Lhokseumawe. Therefore, the objectives of this research were to find out any grammatical difficulties faced by the students in their English Writing Sentences and to cover up any reasonable factor occurs in using English Grammar to their English writing. Case study was adopted in this research by using descriptive qualitative approach. English Department students of IAIN Malikussaleh Lhokseumawe in the second semester (2017/2018 Academic Year) were taken purposively as research subjects. The data were student’s written sentence transferred as documentary evidence with retrospective interview transcription; and (2) Focus Group Discussion note. After analyzing the data qualitatively by Interactive Model Technique, it was found that students got some grammatical difficulties related to (1) problems of meaning complexity, (2) problems of form complexity, and (3) problems of form-meaning mapping relationship. Moreover, by five factors contribute to those difficulties, namely: (1) knowledge of syntactic constituents, (2) knowledge of semantics; (3) knowledge of pragmatics; (4) previous grammar teaching and learning; and (5) L1 knowledge. As the implication, it is suggested that L2 learners be aware of the grammatical difficulties that they are referring to and it is also important that lecturers develop some instructional approaches which focus exclusively on one aspect of language or another (e.g., form and meaning) in teaching the writing that associated with its genre.