STUDENTS DIFFICULTIES IN ANALYZING EXPERIENTIAL FUNCTIONS OF ENGLISH TEXTS

The study was conducted to find out the difficulties faced by the students in analyzing the experiential functions of English narrative, report, and procedure texts. The difficulties were analyzed by identifying the errors made by the students in analyzing the texts given in a test. The method used in this research was the descriptive qualitative analysis. The subjects of this research were 120 students of the fifth semester of Teacher Training and Education Faculty (Fakultas Keguruan dan Ilmu Pendidikan: FKIP) University of Asahan (Universitas Asahan: UNA) Kisaran of 2008-2009 Academic Year. The students comprised three classes in which each consisted of more or less 40 students joining Functional Grammar lecture. Ten students were randomly assigned from each class as the samples of this study. So, the total samples were 30 students or 27.3 % from the total number of the population. The findings showed that there were some difficulties faced by the students in analyzing the experiential functions of English texts being described from the errors they made. The errors were those in separating the clauses from the texts, dividing the elements of the clauses and in labeling the clausal units or elements. From the three errors, errors in labeling the clausal constituents were the most frequent made by the students namely, 55.3 %. The next errors were errors in dividing the clauses into the clausal constituents, 26.1 % and errors in separating the clauses from the text, 18.6 %. The causes of the errors were commonly overgeneralization that was 58.7 %, the other causes were incomplete application of the rules 17.9 %, carelessness 12.2 %, and ignorance of restricted rules 11.1 %. The result of this thesis provides conclusions that the students still had difficulty in analyzing experiential functions of the text, especially in labeling the units of clause. Therefore, it was suggested that the lecturer should improve the students understanding about Functional Grammar by focusing the discussion on how this school of grammar defines what a language is and how it works from its own point of view.