THE ANALYSIS OF SYNTACTIC COMPLEXITY AND GRAMMATICAL ACCURACY IN UNISBANK STUDENTS’ WRITING

Abstract

Syntactic complexity and grammatical accuracy are two of the CAF triad (Complexity, Accuracy, and Fluency) which can be used to measure students’ language proficiency. However, the development of those criteria does not run hand in hand at the same time, as one of the CAF triad stand out more than the other. This research is intended to know the syntactic complexity and grammatical accuracy of students’ writing. The data used in this research were gathered from the second and fourth semester students of UNISBANK who took Introduction to Literature and Introduction to Prose. The participants of this study were 30 students, coming from second and fourth semester students. The data used in this study are the students’ writing of a story called “The Black Cat”. The writing was then analyzed by using Syntactic Complexity Analyzer developed by Xiaofei Lu. Meanwhile, the grammatical accuracy was analyzed by using the online grammar checker and raters’ help. The result shows that second semester students and fourth semester students show similar result of syntactic complexity. In terms of grammatical accuracy, fourth semester students achieve better result than second semester students. This study also claims that there is strong negative correlation between syntactic complexity and grammatical accuracy in second semester students. But, the weak positive correlation is found between syntactic complexity and grammatical accuracy in fourth semester students.