AN INVESTIGATION OF STUDENTS’ PROBLEM IN WRITING RECOUNT TEXT AT THE FIRST SEMESTER OF THE EIGHTH GRADE OF SMPN 4 BANDAR LAMPUNG IN THE ACADEMIC YEAR OF 2016/2017

Writing is the way to express ideas or thought in words to give information for readers. Commonly, writing is the hardest thing for students because they should take a long process. Based on interview with the English teacher, it was found that students had difficulties in organize idea, lack of vocabulary, and write sentence ungrammatically. Therefore, the researcher was interested to know the students’ problem in writing recount text paragraph at the first semester of the eighth grade of SMPN 4 Bandar Lampung. The objective of this research is to find and to know the students’ problem in writing recount text at SMPN 4 Bandar Lampung. The research methodology used in this research is descriptive qualitative research. The sample was chosen based on purposive sampling, the researcher chose VIII B and English teacher as the subject of the research, because the students of VIII B got the lowest score in writing recount text. The number of students of VIII B was 25 students. The researcher used documents, interview, and questionnaire to gather the data. To analyze the data, the researcher used three steps by Miles and Huberman, they are: data reduction, data display, and conclusion drawing/ verification. The result showed that there were five aspects of problem faced by students in writing recount text such as: content (4.10%), organization (14.23%), vocabulary (2.05%), language (33.71%), and then mechanics (45.90)%. It means that, the most dominant problem in writing recount text is mechanics. Beside that, the causes of students problem in writing recount text are grammatical weakness, knowledge and understanding, less practice, and educational background. Keywords: Writing, Students’ Problem in Writing, Recount Text, and Qualitative