An Analysis of the Third Year Students’ Ability in Changing Indirect Speech into Direct Speech at the English Department of Bung Hatta University

Abstrak

Grammar is defined as words put together to make correct sentences. Grammar is, however, not only about how to combine words and then make them into correct sentence but also about meaning. One of the grammar topics is changing an indirect speech into a direct speech. To change an indirect speech into a direct speech, the students have to understand grammar because the sentence forms will change. An indirect speech reports what the speaker has spoken without using the actual words and does not use quotation marks. A direct speech is the actual words spoken by the speaker and it is placed within quotation marks in writing. Generally some students feel confused when changing indirect speech into direct speech because of changes in tenses. The purpose of this research was to find out the third year students’ ability in changing indirect speech into direct speech at the English Department of Bung Hatta University. This research was conducted by using descriptive research design. The population of this research was the third year students at English Department of Bung Hatta University. The total number of population was 23 students. The researcher used total sampling technique to select the sample because the population was less than 100.

            To collect the data, the researcher used writing sentence test in the form of sentence transformation. The researcher asked the students to change indirect speech into direct speech containing statement using simple present tense, simple past tense and simple future tense. To make sure that the measuring instrument was valid, the researcher measured validity and reliability of the test. To maintain the validity of the instrument, the researcher used content validity. It was reached through consulting the test to the syllabus used by the lecturer of Grammar subject. Creswell (2012:148) states that content validity refers to the content and the format of the instrument. To measure the reliability of the instrument, the researcher used inter-rater technique. Gwet (2014:4) states that inter-rater technique is asking two individuals referred to as raters, to independently perform scoring process. The researcher found that the reliability coefficient of the instrument was 0.99 (very high correlation). It means that the instrument was reliable. 

Based on the result of analyzing data, it was found that the third year students’ ability in changing indirect speech into direct speech containing statement using simple present tense, simple past tense and simple future tense was moderate. It was shown by evidence that 26.1% of students had very good ability, 17.4% of them had good ability, 30.4% of them had moderate ability and 26.1% of them had low ability. It means that some of the students were able to change indirect speech into direct speech and some students were not able to do that. Specifically, it can also be concluded that: 1). The third year students’ ability in changing indirect speech into direct speech containing statement using simple present tense at the English Department of Bung Hatta University was very good. It was proved by the fact that 60.8% of the students had very good ability. 2). The third year students’ ability in changing indirect speech into direct speech containing statement using simple past tense at the English Department of Bung Hatta University was low. It was proved by the fact that 65.2% of the students had low ability. 3). The third year students’ ability in changing indirect speech into direct speech containing statement using simple future tense at the English Department of Bung Hatta University was low. It was proved by the fact that 30.5% of the students had low ability.

It can be concluded that the third year students’ ability in changing indirect speech into direct speech at the English Department of Bung Hatta University was moderate. Relating to the conclusion, the researcher suggests English lecturer to give more exercises and more examples especially for students with moderate and low ability because in this research many students made mistake in changing tenses. The researcher also suggests the students to pay attention to the tenses when changing indirect speech into direct speech and to do more exercises. Furthermore, the researcher suggests the next researcher to find out the students’ difficulty in changing indirect speech into direct speech containing statement using simple present tense, simple past tense and simple future tense.

Keywords: Grammar, Ability, Indirect Speech, Direct Speech, Tenses.