AN ANALYSIS OF STUDENTS’ GRAMMATICAL PROBLEMS RELATED TO SIMPLE TENSES AT THE THIRD GRADE CLASS OF SMPN 12 PADANG

Abstrak

The purpose of this study was to describe the kind of grammatical problems had by the third grade students of SMPN 12 Padangrelated to simple tenses e.g simple present tense, simple past tense and simple future tense. The design of this research was descriptive. The population was 227 students and they were devided into eight classes.In choosing the sample, the teqhnique which was used was cluster random sampling. In this research, there were thirty students that were taken as the sample. The instrument which was used in this research was grammar test. The results of this research generally showed that the percentage of students’ problems related to simple tenses was 66%. Related to nominal form in simple present tense, the problem was 11.7% errors in using of verb-be. Besides, in verbal form, there was 90% errors related to the verb form and 100% errors related to the use of auxiliary ‘do’ and ‘does’. Furthermore, the percentage of students’ problems at nominal form in simple past tense was in the use of verb-be. The result was 75.5% errors. In addition, in verbal form, the percentage was 93% errors related to the verb form. Besides, related to nominal form in simple future tense, the percentage of students’ problems was 56.7%. The errors were related to the use of auxiliary ‘be going to/will+be’. Then, in verbal form, the percentage of students’ problems was 74.1%. It was related to the use of auxiliary ‘be going to’ and ‘will’.

Key words: grammatical problems, simple tenses