A STUDY ON STUDENTS’ DIFFICULTIES IN WRITING SHORT STORIES AT GRADE IX IN SMP NEGERI 4 PEMATANGSIANTAR

Writing a short story in English requires students to coordinate vocabulary, grammar, sentence construction, idea development, and organization. This research aimed to identify the difficulties experienced by Grade IX students of SMP Negeri 4 Pematangsiantar in writing English short stories and to explore the factors contributing to those difficulties. A descriptive qualitative design was employed. The participants were 32 students of Grade IX-1, all of whom completed an individual writing task; five of them were then selected through purposive sampling for semi-structured interviews. The students’ written texts and the interview data were analyzed using the interactive model of Miles et al. (data collection, data reduction, data display, and conclusion drawing and verification), and credibility was supported through methodological triangulation. The findings show that difficulties appeared in four of the five aspects examined. Grammar was the most evident difficulty, reflected in inappropriate tense use, omission of auxiliary verbs, incorrect verb forms, and omission of articles. The students also had difficulties in constructing complete sentences, in developing initial ideas into more complete story content, and, in a small number of data, in using vocabulary appropriately. Organization was not identified as a specific difficulty because the students were generally able to arrange the main events in a recognizable sequence. The interviews indicated that the difficulties may be related to internal factors (low motivation, low self-confidence, writing anxiety, limited linguistic knowledge, and cognitive demands) and one external factor (limited writing practice).