An Analysis on English Students’ Difficulties in TOEFL test of Structure and Written Expression Section at IAIN Padangsidimpuan

Abstract

The problem of this research came from students’ difficulties on aspects of structure and written expression in TOEFL test. The difficulties found in students’ answer sheets could be analyzed. The objectives of this research are to identify the difficulties on aspects of structure and to identify the difficulties on aspects of written expression in TOEFL test 1. This is a qualitative research which used document analysis method. The participants of this research are 35 students of English department. The data was collected from students’ documents of question sheets and answer sheets in TOEFL test 1. Analysis of the data consisted of 5 steps; they are data managing, reading/memoing, description, classifying, and interpreting. This research used triangulate technique to check data trustworthiness. Based on the result of the research, the researcher found the difficulties on aspects of structure from the students were consisted of WIAS, word choice, word order, verb form and parallelism. From these five grammatical aspects, WIAS was the highest percentage (72.85%) that students could not answer the questions correctly, so that aspect was the hardest one for the students. It also showed that verb form, which 25.71% of participants could not answer correctly, was the least difficult one for the students. From the difficulties on aspects of written expression, the researcher encountered from the students was consisted of part of speech, plural, verb form, pronoun errors, prepositional errors, article, parallelism and conjunction. From these aspects, pronoun error was the highest percentage (82.86%) that students could not answer the questions correctly, so that aspect was the most difficult one for the studens. It also showed that plural, which 28.57% of participants could not answer correctly, was the least difficult one for the students