ABSTRACT
The objective of this final project is to describe types of difficulties faced by the second grade students of SMU Negeri 8 Semarang in the academic year of 2004/2005 when they write paragraphs.
Before doing the field project, I tried to find out the meaning of writing and paragraph. I also looked at the curriculum about kinds of paragraphs taught in Senior High School grade 2. Based on that information I prepared an instrument which was appropriate. Here, the students have to produce their own sentences. They could write their ideas on the form of paragraphs. It would show their real difficulty in writing.
When the data had been collected, I then analyzed each sentences. I found many errors and classified those errors into grammatical and semantic errors. On grammatical errors, I divided it into 5 kinds of errors. Those were errors in noun, verb, adjective, pronoun, and article. While on semantic errors I tried to analyze the meaning of students’ sentences. These errors could be divided into sentence errors and inter-sentence errors. Besides grammatical and semantic errors, I also found the other errors which could not be classified into one of those errors.
In my opinion, the students’ errors in sentences occurred because they only transferred rules from their mother tongue, and they did not really understand their target language. So, to minimize those errors, it is suggested that English teachers give clear explanation. They also have to give a lot of practices to use those rules in writing sentences and paragraphs.
