The background of this study is based on phenomenon that the use of punctuation marks were often less considered by the eighth grade students of MTs Darul Ulum Semarang in the academic year of 2009/2010. Some of them regarded that the presence of marks in writing would not influence their writing of being understood by readers. They just wrote and punctuated their writing automatically without having enough attention toward the importance of punctuation marks.
The purpose of this study can be described as follow:
1. To find out errors of using punctuation marks in dialogue text which are encountered by eighth grade students of MTs Darul Ulum Semarang in the academic year of 2009/2010 when they were punctuating unmarked dialogue text.
2. To describe factors which cause the errors of using punctuation marks in dialogue text.
3. To know how students’ awareness of using appropriate punctuation mark in dialogue text.
This is a descriptive quantitative study. The object of this study is the eighth grade students of MTs Darul Ulum Semarang in the academic year of 2009/2010. The method of collecting data is using test and interview. Meanwhile, a statistical analysis and interpretation are applied to analyze the data of this study.
The result of this study shows that there are 686 total errors of students’ punctuations which are dominated by capital letter, comma, question mark, full stop, colon, Apostrophe, and semicolon. Besides that, there are also 1087 errors of students’ typical errors and they are divided into: over generalization, ignorance of rule restriction, incomplete application of rule and false concept hypothesized.
There are three major factors which caused students’ punctuation those are students, teacher, and syllabus design factor. For a whole level awareness of using appropriate punctuation marks in dialogue text by the eighth grade students of MTs Darul Ulum Semarang in the academic year of 2009/2010, they can be said have GOOD LEVEL of awareness because they had answered total 3627 of 4368 items correctly or about 83.035% of total questions correctly