AN

ANALYSIS
COMPETENCE

ON

STUDENTS

GRAMMATICAL

Introduction
Grammar is in fact a language rule which is considered determinate in
nature. This means that the language rules or grammar rules are usually
considered static. They have no sig-nificant development or changes from
time to time or from generation to generation in which by no means,
naturally, give students learning the language no significant problems. As
grammar rules dont give any changes, language grammar should be
understood as an easy subject for students to learn. To students learning
the language, grammar rules should be understood and accepted as a
helpful facil-ity which does not only help students learning the language
successful in presenting the ideas and feelings, language grammar also
helps students make their social lives through their abilities in
communication develop well. This could only be achieved when language
grammar is considered easy for the students to learn.
On the contrary, some students learning English consider that grammar
is their most difficult subject to learn and master. Quite many empirical
data showed that language grammar was not easy for the language learners to master. They found it quite difficult to arrange words into correct
phrases and sen-tences to express their ideas or information. If they could
succeed in expressing their ideas in the either oral or written forms, their
utter-ances or sentences were not good and accept-able enough in
expressing those ideas.
The most saddening situation happened when students had to do outcampus aca-demic activities such as having teaching prac-tice and writing
a thesis as their final academic task by which they had to express their
topic and ideas in their English. The fact that they never tried out their
courage in speaking Eng-lish in public just showed that their accuracy and
fluency needed much development.
Referring to the situation mentioned above, the research on the students
gram-matical competence was quite necessary to accomplish both for the
purpose of designing the institutions programs as well as the development of teaching and learning quality itself.
Having the result of this research, the overall students grammatical
competence was totally disclosed. Besides, this research also presented
topics considered problematic to students. Therefore then, this would be
good advantage for department lecturers to anticipate the teaching and
learning strategy which would be applied to get better results. Not to
mention, this result could also benefit to practitioners in handling their
professional activities.

Theoretical Review
Grammar has become the central topic which could be considered quite
strategic for students in learning a language. A language learner would
not be able to master the lan-guage he is learning without good grammar
competence.
Grammar is considered as the language systems or language rules.
Without such a system or grammar, a language will fail to function well for
a communication. Wilkins (1983: 68) stated as the following; it is
axiomatic that language is systematized. If it were not so, we should not
be able to understand each other. With-out having quite good grammar
competence, a language learner would not be able to develop the four
macro language skills fluently. Those four macro language skills are
speaking, read-ing, listening and writing.
Grammar has obviously large aspects to learn. Grammar covers among
others the lan-guage morphology and certainly language syntax. Having a
lot of grammatical topics to learn in classes, students sometimes find it
quite confused to master the English language profoundly. The topics
could range from grammar of word formation to sentence for-mation or
sentence patterns.
Sentence tenses have also become quite potential topics for learners to
get problems. These problems may come from the fact that there are
several clear aspects of difference between their mother tongue and
English. Indonesian, as their mother tongue, has no tenses while English
has got ones students should pay attention to. According to the time span,
English has three different times. Those are past tense or kurun waktu
lampau, present tense or kurun waktu kini and future tense or kurun
waktu akanan. Bahasa Indonesia, on the contrary, has no such tense or
kurun waktu.
Tense and sentence patterns has been po-tential problems for students.
Consequently, a sentence in each tense has its own different forms and
meanings. This has become the source problems which students improve
quite slowly to solve by themselves. As the return, they could not develop
those macro language skills well. These problems have be-come quite
obvious when students have to do compulsory academic tasks individually
or in groups, such as individual presentations or group work or
discussions. Quite often do students express their ideas and information in
broken English and in influent manners which turn into problems as well
for other people to understand. In other chances, the situation changes
into a long quiet as the re-sult of their both vacant understanding between the speaker and the listeners.

The students ability in asking and also answer questions is also quite
miserable. As the result that situation and being afraid of taking the risks
of being mocked by others, quite many students then turn into a safe
man-ner just by applying silent learning strategy. As it happens as well,
when one has to apply an individual task like presentation, most of them
get problems in expressing ideas on the subject being presented. This,
then, in turns, creates an unexpected learning situation by which good
and smooth communication be-tween them will not certainly happen perfectly.
Grammar has, thus, become the basis of language skill and ability
improvement. The mastery of good grammar and tenses will therefore
facilitate easy time and room for stu-dents to do English language
activities and also other non-English activities. As it hap-pens conversely,
bad grammar or tenses compe-tence will certainly block students to get
good achievements in both English and non-English activities students
must do in all various top-ics. The problems of expressing ideas will come
to a situation where the speaker will find it difficult to set an interaction as
he wants to. Communication problems will then create bad expectations.
The inability of mas-tering good grammar or tenses will cause them to
have problems in understanding a dis-course, both oral and written
discourse. On how far good grammar or tenses has the contri-bution in
language activities, Velt (1986; 1) stated as the following:
Grammar, as we mean it, is simply your lan-guage knowledge. What your
brain knows that allows you to use language we will call your grammar.
Your grammar is what enables you to understand the very words you are
now reading as well as to speak and write words and sentences of your
own. You have had a gram-mar of English for as long as you have known
English.
Students of English Education Depart-ment (Program Studi Pendidikan
Bahasa Ing-gris) are certainly led to become English teach-ers. To become
good English teachers, good grammar or tense competence is a skill
consid-ered compulsory for all English students. Cer-tainly, good conduct
of English grammar or tenses of a teacher will lead his students under his
teaching to learn English well. A good teacher will certainly present what
he knows to his students well. Therefore, in order to ac-complish his job
perfectly, grammar or tense competence is a compulsory thing to master
well. This is well stated by Billows (1996; 115) as saying the following:
First, as teachers, we must have clear ideas of the grammar of a
language. Its structure and usage, and everything we teach must be
based on it; second, we should always be conscious of introducing and
practicing some points of grammar; and third, we must carry the stages of
development of the language in our head so that is the mind of student
Grammar or tenses is such a very important aspect for an English
department student to master well that the lecturer has tried to apply in
his teaching and learning process in order to make the students perform

well. Yet, among all approaches applied focus much on developing the
students language skills in the classroom practices. Nunan (1998: 12)
under-lined how important such practices as the fol-lowing:
The primary of instruction in grammar is to help the students use English
correctly and appropriately. While some classroom time will undoubtedly
be devoted to teaching grammar rules and to having students practice
gram-matical patterns, it is important to remember that such instruction
is not only the means towards in the language.
Even though practices have very strategic functions in language learning,
but it seems the success of the teaching and learning a language does not
solely on the practices them-selves as the practices are not properly designed on the target skills to achieve. Great improvement is usually
achieved well when the teaching and learning activities are based on the
natural way of learning a language. The natural way of learning a
language here means to have activities or practices which are based on
developing communication compe-tence.
Natural language learning gives a lot of advantages to the language
learners. The lan-guage learners will have the feeling of high confidence in
practicing the language and they may have the feeling of confidence as
well to have the advantages in doing so. They certainly build their skills as
well as confi-dence to have advantageous life having good skill of
communication. Within this context of natural learning, Litlewood (1981:
17) stressed as the following: many aspects of language learning can
take place only through natural proc-ess which operate when a person
involved in using the language for communication. Littlewood ex-plained
that language learning can be accom-plished through natural language
learning in the form of language communication. Yet, something should be
understood well that well planned communication will run smoothly when
the two parties running the communication have the same language background of good grammar or tenses. When either one of the couple does
not have enough capac-ity to hold the desired communication, the
planned communication will not exactly hap-pen. Good grammar and
tenses will certainly facilitate both the communicator and the communicant. The absence of grammar and tenses competence will clearly
block the possibility of the communication to happen. Gass (1989: 5)
stressed the importance of grammar and tenses competence as the
following:
A theory of language acquisition must be con-strained by knowledge of
what a grammar con-sists of, and a grammar of a language must be
something that humans are capable of con-structing, given the general
characteristics of the information available to the learner.
Unfortunately, the teaching and learning approaches which teachers
usually apply in developing grammar or tenses are mostly con-sidered
conventional. This means that the teaching and learning approaches are
accom-plished in classes through oral explanative approaches;
uncontextual drilling, audio-oral practices which are all considered to be

classi-fied into the teacher centred learning ap-proach. Those practices

mentioned earlier done by classical strategy did not develop stu-dents
analytical abilities as highlighted through the description or statement
accessed on December 12, 2009 (file://A:\Integrated grammar. htm) as
the following:
The traditional approach pattern is based on upon a format which explains
the lesson, gives examples, and then provides drills for students on such
topics as the following: parts of speech, verb tenses, active vs. passive
verbs, dependent and independent clauses, punctuation. The sim-plicity
or complexity of the lesson depends upon the grade level of the text.
Teaching and learning on grammar or tenses should be better
accomplished through integrated grammatical approach, a concept of the
teaching and learning approach which develops students ideas,
understanding and comprehending the topic or subject matter through
discussion, written passage analysis, and contextual exposures. Therefore,
this ap-proach focuses much on the contextual learn-ing strategy. Through
contextual analysis and approach, students comprehension will cover
thoroughly. Their understanding will not just focus on a particular aspect
as grammar or tenses are not the subject which should be pre-sented
separately from context and other as-pects in trying to master the
language being learned. Not to mention, when the the lan-guage learning
is intended to develop broader target, for example specially on developing
communication proficiency.
From the theoretical background being described, the conclusion just
implies that grammar or tenses competence is quite impor-tant and
strategic in mastering the language being learned. Hopefully the result of
this re-search will give good and operational feed-back to develop the
grammar or tenses in the accomplishment of overall teaching and learning in general.
However, the knowledge someone has is not always identical to the ability
in ap-plying his knowledge. This means well under-stood that having much
knowledge for him does not always imply his skills and abilities in using
the language relevant to his language knowledge. Susan M Gass
(2009:19) reiterated that humans have knowledge of language quite
apart from their ability to use that language. It is well understood as well
that knowledge and skills or abilities are two different things. That a skill
comes from certain knowledge is some-thing undebatable, especially
dealing with grammatical competence and its implication in the language
activities. Gass (2009: 5) un-derlined that according to a language
research a language grammar somebody has will func-tion well to
understand and master the lan-guage perfectly. It is explained in following
by saying that utterances which are ungrammatical or otherwise illformed, when judged by the gener-ally accepted rules of the language
they are learn-ing.

All expressions taken from language learners are analyzed grammatically

to test whether those expressions are classified as grammatical language
productions or un-grammatical language productions. The un-grammatical
language productions are then compared to lead to their types to get each
its category whether the unacceptable expres-sions are influenced by the
first language or other aspects. Gass (2009: 6) in this context explained;
An important difference between first language and second language
acquisition from the point of view of linguistic theory is that in second
language acquisition learners are confronted with the dynamic interplay
of the two (or more) linguis-tic systems.
Language errors which then devel-oped into a study known as error
analysis ac-cording to Judith Chun (in Hartono, 1990: 32) gives a lot
contribution to the language learn-ing. Error analysis on language learning
gives language teachers the ability to analyse the learning problems and
to hopefully find a suitable learning strategy in developing stu-dents
comprehension and skills, both spoken and written ones.
The main goal of this research was to know the level of students
grammar or tenses and to disclose the typical problems on gram-mar or
tenses, including the mapping of poten-tial grammar problems to
students.