Abstract:
Grammar is an important part to learn in the process of acquiring language
in order to help someone to use the language grammatically and meaningfully.
Grammar has a lot of elements; one of them is modal auxiliary. The students are
usually confused because modal auxiliaries have special grammatical feature and
have more than one meaning. The aims of this research are to measure the
students’ ability and to find out the casual factors related to their ability.
The type of this research is descriptive qualitative research. The subjects
of this research are class X TP 2B that consist of 28 students and class X TSM A
that consist of 22 students. The researcher uses a test and a questionnaire to
collect the data. The test is used to measure the students’ ability in using modal
auxiliary. The questionnaire is used to find out the casual factors related to their
ability.
The result of the test shows that there are 10 students (20%) categorized
very good, 6 students (12%) categorized good, 19 students (38%) categorized fair,
13 students (26%) categorized poor, and 2 students (4%) categorized very poor. It
means that the students’ ability in using modal auxiliary belongs to fair category.
Moreover, the casual factors to the students’ ability shown in the result of
questionnaire are lack understanding about the meaning and the function of modal
auxiliary and also the lack knowledge about modal auxiliary used in past form.
