An analysis of students’ ability and difficulties in writing news item text at grade x MAN 2 Padangsidimpuan

This research discussed about an analysis of students’ ability and difficulties in writing news item text at grade X MAN 2 Padangsidimpuan. The students’ problems in this research were most of students’ ability in writing was still low, they could not differ each generic structure of texts and they found difficulties in constructing sentences and vocabularies. Students also did not write in chronological order. Other thing that also become problem is MAN 2 Padangsidimpuan revealed the average of students’ writing achievement of grade X is 79, whereas, KKM of grade X is 85. In brief, students’ writing achievement did not fulfill the expectation. The kind of this research was qualitative research by using descriptive method. Researcher used interview and test as the instrument to collect the data. The form of the test was essay test by giving clues. The research was done in MAN 2 Padangsidimpuan. The sources of data was the first year students, there were 23 students at grade X Unggulan 1 MAN 2 Padangsidimpuan. Data was processed and analyzed with qualitative process. Based on the result of research, researcher found that the mean score of students’ ability in writing news item text at grade X Unggulan 1 MAN 2 Padangsidimpuan was 59.04% then it categorized enough. Then, based on the result of interview, researcher concluded that the students’ difficulties in writing news item text were determining and developing idea, not focusing on the central idea, not using variety vocabularies (especially in using noun, verb and adverb), not using a good structure and grammar, and having a bad mechanic in writing sentence. The last, the students had low motivation and concentration in writing