ELEVENTH GRADE STUDENTS’ ABILITY IN WRITING FORMAL INVITATION LETTER AT SMA N 10 MEDAN

The objective of this research is to describe the eleventh grade students‘ writing ability and difficulties in writing formal invitation letter at SMA N 10. This study used a mixed method in which the researcher used both quantitative nd qualitative methods to interpret and describe the phenomena in the data. Data collected through written tests and interview. The written test results were analyzed following the writing components from Brown (2004) which consist of content, organization, grammatical, vocabulary and mechanic. The students‘ scores were afterward examined using central tendency, which are mean, mode, and median. Then interviews were conducted with students regarding students' difficulties in writing according to difficulties in psychological, linguistic (grammatical and vocabulary), and cognitive (content, organization, and mechanics). The population of this study was eleventh grade students. The sample of this study were XI IPA 1 which consisted of 33 students. The research findings show several things. The first point is that the average student score in writing
formal invitation letters is 76.34 which is classified in the good level. The component that students wrote best was content with an average of 3.2. Then the lowest component written by students was organization with an average of 2.7.
Therefore, students' ability to write formal invitation letters is classified at the good level. Following the results of the written test analysis, from interview with students, it was found that students experienced difficulties in writing. Students experienced difficulties in writing in accordance with psychological, linguistic
(grammar and vocabulary) and cognitive (content, organization and mechanics) aspects.