Conclusions CONCLUSIONS AND SUGGESTIONS

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CHAPTER V CONCLUSIONS AND SUGGESTIONS

This chapter consists of two parts: conclusions and suggestions. Conclusions are the summary of the data analysis. Meanwhile, suggestions are recommendations which are proposed for ELESP lecturers, students, and future researchers after the researcher analyzed the research result.

A. Conclusions

This research was intended to investigate the mastery of sixth semester students on the use of articles. There were three research problems proposed in this research: 1 what concepts of articles have the students mastered? , 2 what are the errors committed by the students? , and 3 what are the possible causes of the errors? To find out the answers of those research questions, a test was conducted. The test consisted of two parts: filling in the blanks, and translation parts. The first part required the students to complete a sentence with an articles a, an, the, Ø. Meantime, the second part asked the students to translate nouns in provided sentences and Indonesian context, and then add articles for the nouns. Meantime, to find out the possible causes of errors, the researcher compared Indonesian grammar and English grammar in the part of singular plural theories, and also compared English articles theories particularly the possible theories which might lead the students to make errors when they had to produce articles. 79 Generally, the students already mastered articles since the mean of the students’ mastery was 68.42. Viewed from the mean, the students’ mastery could be classified into sufficient mastery. The standard of mastery was also for the mastery of each concept. The concepts which already fulfilled that criterion, in other words, the concepts that the students have mastered, are: 1 singular generic nouns of which first letter is spelled and sounds as a vowel or a diphthong, 2 noncount generic nouns, 3 singular definite nouns, 4 plural definite nouns, 5 noncount definite nouns, 6 singular indefinite nouns of which first letter is spelled and sounds as a vowel or a diphthong, 7 singular indefinite nouns of which first letter is spelled as a consonant, yet sounds as a vowel or a diphthong, 8 singular indefinite nouns of which first letter is spelled and sounds as a consonant, 9 singular indefinite nouns of which first letter is spelled as a vowel or a diphthong, yet sounds as a consonant. To sum up, the students mastered articles since they already master 9 out of 13 concepts. The high numbers of the concepts mastered showed that there were only a few errors made by the students. The concept that was not well mastered by the students was the concept of generic nouns. The students committed errors when they had to choose the appropriate articles for generic nouns, particularly singular and plural generic nouns. There were two kinds of errors found in the students’ test result: 1 an omission of articles for singular generic nouns a oran, and 2 an addition of the for plural generic nouns. The researcher found that the possible causes for the errors were the influence of both Indonesian language and also English language itself. The 80 students still had a low awareness that a singular generic noun needs an article. It might be caused by the influence of the inconsistency of Indonesian language in using words indicating singular nouns the words: sebuah, seekor, etc, and the generalization of article rules for plural and noncount generic nouns. Meanwhile, the possible sources of addition of the were the use of plural nouns for definite nouns in Indonesian language, and hesitation in the students’ mind when they were choosing an article for plural generic nouns. To sum up, the students’ mastery of articles was already sufficient. Nonetheless, they still need a guidance to improve their awareness toward several concepts like singular generic nouns and plural generic noun. The students till committed several errors on the use of articles. To improve the students’ mastery on the use of articles, this research provided several suggestions discussed in the next subchapter.

B. Suggestions