The First Year Students’ Ability to Write Sentence Using Modal Obligation at English Department of Bung Hatta University.

Abstrak

Writing is a method of representing language in visual or tactile form. Even, it also needs a lot of attention and effort when we learn it as academic writing (Virdyna: 2016,69). Writing is important to be mastered by the students. If someone can write something, she/he can also express her/his ideas through the written form. According to Walsh in Klimova (2013: 9), writing is important because it  is used extensively in higher education and in the work place. If students do not  know how to express themselves in writing, they will not be able to communicate well with professors, employers, peers, or just about anyone else. Writing sentence is a process of writing to express the ideas and it contains a set of words that has a subject and predicate, delivering a statemant, question, exclamation or command, and consisting of a main clause or subordinate clauses. Relating to this, the researcher conducted this study on purpose of describing the students’ ability to write sentence using modal obligation.

             The population of this research was the first year students at English Department of Bung Hatta University. The number of sample was 27 students selected using total sampling technique. The data of this research were collected by using writing test. To make the test reliable, the researcher asked students to write simple sentence using modal obligation “ must and have to”in affirmative sentence and “ must not and don’t/doesn’t have to” in negative sentence. It was found that reliability index of the test was 0.92. (Appendix 6). It means that the tes was reliable.

            The result of this research it was concluded that the first year students’ ability to write sentence using modal obligation at English Department of Bung Hatta Univerity in general was very good. Specificaly 62.96% of te students’ ability in writing sentence using “must” in affirmative sentence was very good, 55.56%  of the students’ ability in writing sentence using “have to” in affirmative sentence was very good,  59.26% of the students’ ability in writing sentence using “must not” in negative sentence was very good , 55.56% of the students’ ability in writing sentence using “don’t/doesn’t have to” in negative sentence was very good.

            In line with the findings of this study as discussed above, it can be concluded that the first year students’ ability to write sentence using modal obligation at English Department of Bung Hatta University was very good. Relating to the conclusion, she suggests English lecturers to increase the difficulty level of exercises and to give more exercises. And the students are suggested to learn more about modal obligation and to do more exercises.

Key word: Writing, modal obligation