Grammatical Difficulties in Using Simple Present Tense in Presenting Spoken Exposition Text by The Second Year of MAN 2 Padang Students

Abstract

Simple present tense is one of language features of exposition text studied by senior high school students. However, there are still some difficulties faced by the students in using simple present tense in speaking. The aim of this research is to describe students’ difficulties in using simple present tense in spoken exposition text. It was conducted at MAN 2 Padang in MayJune 2017, with Grade XI of Science program students as the population and the total of 38 students as the sample of the research chosen by stratified random sampling method. The data oft his research was in the form of transcript of students’ speaking, obtained by speaking test. The result showed that there were grammatical difficulties in both verbal and nominal clauses using simple present tense. The most frequent difficulties in verbal clauses were subject-verb agreement (51%) and the use of auxiliary verb (18%). On the other hand, the most frequent difficulties in nominal clauses were no verb (71%) and no subject (13%). This research is expected to be a based for the next researches examining the grammatical difficulties in speaking of other senior high school students so the more significant result could be obtained to get the solution for this problem.