Electronic Theses and Dissertation

Key word: an analytical exposition text, obstacle, understanding. the purpose of the study is to find out the obstacles faced by the second year students of sma negeri 4 banda aceh in understanding analytical exposition text. the population of this study was the second year students of sma negeri 4 banda aceh. there were eight classes for the second year which consisted of five natural science classes and three social science classes. as the sample, the writer took four classes namely, 2is/3, 21a/3, 2ia/2 and 21s/l. the total numbers of the sample were 128 students. the method applied in th.is study was descriptive quantitative. the instrument was a test. the test consisted of 30 question items which was divided into 5 question categories of analytical exposition text; genres, purposes, generic structure/ organization, name of each paragraph., and lexicogrammatical/language features. here, index of difficulty and percentage were used to analyze the data. the result of the test showed that the second year students of sma negeri 4 banda aceh had difficulties in answering analytical exposition text questions. based on the percentage of index difficulty, the generic structure/organization of the text and lexicogrammatical/language features of the text question were the most difficult question categories with the same percentage of index difficulty was 66.7%. the easiest question was the question about the genre of text, with the percentage of index difficulty was 16.7%. in addition, both of the purposes and name of each paragraph of the text questions were considered as fair questions with the same index of difficulty at 33.3%. as a result, the ability of comprehending the analytical exposition text is still need to be improved by the students.