SURIYANTI Pengarang Rostanti Toba, M.Pd. Dosen Pembimbing 1 Anis Komariah, M.Pd. Dosen Pembimbing 2 Rostanti Toba, M.Pd. Penguji 1 Anis Komariah, M.Pd. Penguji 2 Widya Noviana Noor, M.Pd. Ketua Penguji

Suriyanti, 2022. The Students’ Problems in Writing Descriptive Text at Seventh Grade Students of SMP Negeri 3 Samarinda in Academic Year 2021/2022. Thesis, English Education Department, Teacher Training and Education Faculty, Stated Islamic University of Sultan Aji Muhammad Idris Samarinda. Advisor: (1) Mrs. Rostanti Toba M.Pd. (2) Ms. Anis Komariah M.Pd. Writing skill is one of the abilities that students must be mastered. By writing, students can express ideas, opinions, and feelings. Based on the junior high school curriculum, several basic competencies students must achieve in writing English texts. The competencies to help students develop their skills and produce simple functional written texts. Descriptive text is a basic competency that is difficult for students to learn. This is because students cannot pour writing ideas into a text. This research aimed to find out the problems of students in writing descriptive texts faced by seventh grade students of SMP Negeri 3 Samarinda in the academic year 2021/2022. This research uses descriptive qualitative methods. In collecting data, the researcher took several steps. The researcher prepared the research instrument. The researcher interviewed two English teachers in seventh grade, conducted a written test and distributed questionnaires to students. This research started in the second semester on March 7, 2022 in the seventh grade of SMP Negeri 3 Samarinda in the academic year 2021/2022. The population in this research was seventh grade students of SMP Negeri 3 Samarinda in the academic year 2021/2022. However, the researcher only took 2 classes out of a total of 9 classes, namely 7A and 7E with a total of 69 students as subjects. To collect the data, the researcher used several instruments, namely writing tests, questionnaires and teacher interviews. The results of this research indicate that students face several problems in writing descriptive texts, in the content, organization, grammar, vocabulary, and mechanics. However, from the results obtained, students’ biggest problem in writing is mechanical, organization, vocabulary. From the results of the writing test, the average score of students was 47%, with scores of content (141), organization (126), grammar (131), vocabulary (130), and mechanics (122). This problem is also supported by the questionnaire result students experience difficulties in mechanics, organization, and vocabulary with a total score of 54.8%.