Students’ Perceptions on Grammar Teaching in English Department of SWCU

The 6th International Seminar 2012 “Research in Teacher Education : What, How, and Why?” Salatiga, November 21-22, 2012Teaching translation and writing has made me realize that most of my students‟ difficulties in learning are related to their mastery of grammar. In translation classes, students could not translate English texts into Indonesian in a good way mostly because they were unable to understand the meaning of the English texts due to the complexity of the sentence structures. Often students did not recognize passive structures and could not differentiate verbs from nouns. As in writing classes many students produced awkward or meaningless sentences simply because they could not put the words in a good order. This is surprising since the students especially those taking translation must have taken grammar classes before. This has triggered the questions, Have we taught grammar properly? Have the grammar lessons we taught fulfils the students‟ needs? To answer those questions, questionnaires are distributed and interviews are done to students. Thus this paper is aimed to describe students‟ points of view on grammar teaching in English Department of Satya Wacana Christian University (SWCU)