Exploring sentence skills of the first-year English major students’ argumentative essays

Abstrak

Writing proficiency is one of crucial indicators of academic success, while most English learners face it as a challenging skill. Thus, this research aimed at analyzing sentence skills of the first-year English major students’ argumentative essays. In the previous semester, they were given Grammar, Linguistics, and Paragraph Writing subjects to equip them with the ability in writing sentences. This current semester, they are taking an Essay Writing subject as a continuation of the previous subject they had. This research’s scope was the analysis of the use of subject-verb agreements, sentence fragments, run-on sentences, and pronoun references. Those grammatical categories refer to what was stated by Langan in revising students’ essays which is the so-called four bases. By examining twenty-five essays written by the first-year English major students in a private university in South Jakarta, Indonesia, this research finding shows that students still struggle to apply the concept of English grammar since the errors were found in basic grammatical rules. Most of the errors were found in sentence fragment categories and subject-verb agreement which show that they had confusion in differentiating dependent and independent clauses and the use of singular subject for singular verb and vice versa. While only few errors were found in run-on sentences and pronoun reference. This result could shed light on learning strategies applied by lecturers based on students’ weaknesses.