AN ANALYSIS OF STUDENTS’ ABILITY IN WRITING NARRATIVE TEXT (A Qualitative Research at the First Grade MIPA I of MAN 2 Aceh Besar)

The research aims to analyze students’ ability in writing a narrative text according to the generic structure and to find out the students’ difficulties in writing narrative text. Additionally, this research also had the purpose to provide some information about students’ narrative text. Therefore, in this research, the researcher analyzed whether students in X MIPA I at MAN 2 Aceh Besar had similar problems to the participants from the previous research. In addition, the number of students from X MIPA I was 18 students so that all of them participated in writing the narrative text. The design of the study was descriptive qualitative research. Moreover, in collecting the data, the researcher used several research instruments. For instance document analysis that used to know whether students composing the narrative text depending on the generic structure. Besides, focus group discussion (FGD) was used to realize students' difficulty in creating a narrative text. Another, interview guide with the English teacher was used to get data on students’ problems in writing. As the result, the research finding showed that from 18 participants only 8 students wrote the narrative following the generic structure. Additionally, 10 of them did not write the narrative text based on the generic structure. In addition, focus group discussion results indicated that most of the students had few problems in writing. For instance, did not understand the generic structure, lack understanding of the language features, had limited vocabulary to express their ideas, had no ideas, had difficulty in organizing ideas, lack of grammatical knowledge, had difficulty to chose appropriate words, felt difficult to spell the word, had limited time, and did not like the English subject. Besides, the interview result with the English teacher demonstrated that most of the students lack of vocabulary, lack of grammatical knowledge, lack of understanding in the word choice, and lack of motivation.