Exploring Goofing on Students' Performance of Writing in the First Grade at 19 Junior High Scholl Tangerang

chandra dewi s., m.pd., kons; ujang suparman, ma, ph.d; dr.h. gunawan suryoputro, m.hum;

The purpose of the research is to explore goofing that students made in their writings and difficulties of writing. Specifically, this research attempts to answer the question "what type of goofing made by the students in their writing in the class" and "what difficulties do the students made in their writing". The data of the research, were gathered by the way of classroom observations and interviews. There were 10 students from the same class (7G), 10 students from different class (7B) and one English teacher chosen purposively as the participants of the research. Classroom observations were the main technique used by the researcher to collect the data. Students interviews and teacher interviews were used to support the classroom observations-based data. The observations-interviews based data were analyzed qualitatively by grouping them into categories based on the types of goofing and the difficulties the students made in their writing. The major findings of the research are that goofing and the difficulties the students made in their writings because: (1) they were not able to arrange grammatical correct English sentences and tense, (2) they do not have enough vocabulary, (3) they do not understand to use correct punctuation: comma, capital letter, small letter and full stop.