Grammatically meaningful english sentence building as a starting point in teaching composition to SMA students

In learning the English Language, students should learn the four language skills: listening, speaking, reading and writing. Among the four language skills, writing skills is considered the most annoying subjects; in teaching writing, most teachers find troubles which may arise from the way of giving guidance to the students and/ or the way of scoring the students’ works. Whereas, many SMA students have difficulties in putting their sentences down on paper, whenever they begin to write because teachers never train them how to write grammatically meaningful English sentences in compositions. Almost all exercises found in all SMA students’ reference books do not present how to write English compositions. Trying to overcome those problems, the writer of this thesis presents one idea about how to teach grammatically meaningful English sentences as a starting point in teaching composition to SMA students so that they will be able to write meaningful English composition later on. The idea is inspired from the objectives of teaching writing at SMA as stated in the GBPP of 1984, that is “students should be trained how to write good and correct English sentences and arrange them into various simple forms of paragraphs or composition”. In sentence building, students are given various kind of exercises. They are meant to give students practice in discovering additional information about the events put into grammatically meaningful sentences which are then developed into paragraphs or compositions. This thesis is the result of a library research. Most of the informations presented here were taken from books and articles from the school library. It is aimed at giving some help for SMA English teachers in teaching writing to their students. Finally, the writer realizes that this thesis is far from perfect. Therefore, she hopes other researchers will make experiments to see whether this technique is useful or not for SMA students