The Analysis of Students’ Ability in Using Modal Auxiliary of the Tenth Grade Students of SMK PN 2 Purworejo in the Academic Year of 2016/2017

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.