Syntactic Tree Diagram: Students' Problems and the Causes

International Journal of English Linguistics, Literature, and Education (IJELLE) Vol. 5, No. 1, June 2023, pp. 68-76 ISSN 2686-0120 (print), 2686-5106 (online) 68 http://journal.univetbantara.ac.id/index.php/ijelle/index SYNTACTIC TREE DIAGRAM: STUDENTS' PROBLEMS AND THE CAUSES Sri Widyarti Ali a,1,, Indri Wirahmi Bay*b,2, Istiana Mufatiroh b,3 a English Education Study Program, Letters and Culture Faculty, Gorontalo State University, Indonesia. English Education Study Program, Letters and Culture Faculty, Gorontalo State University, Indonesia c English Education Study Program, Letters and Culture Faculty, Gorontalo State University, Indonesia 1 ; 2 * * Corresponding Author b Received 5 June 2023 ; accepted 6 July 2023 ; published 7 July 2023 ABSTRACT Syntactic tree diagrams are used to help students recognize and analyze sentence structure. This study aims to discover students' difficulties in constructing syntactic tree diagrams of simple sentences. The descriptive qualitative approach was implemented with six English Department students participating as research participants. The data was gathered using interviews as the primary instrument and tests as the secondary instrument. The findings of this study show that students have six problems when constructing the syntactic tree diagram: determining phrase structure rules, placing words and phrases, determining word classes, drawing the diagram of long sentences, drawing arrows on the syntactic tree diagram, and identifying sentences with ambiguous meaning. Furthermore, some factors, such as insufficient knowledge of tree diagrams, the classroom environment, and a lack of confidence, contribute to students' difficulties in drawing the syntactic tree diagram of simple sentences. In light of the findings of this study, it is proposed that students practice constructing the syntactic tree diagram. Furthermore, lecturers are expected to give students more practice constructing syntactic tree diagrams in order to improve their ability to analyze sentence structure. KEYWORDS Syntactic Tree Diagram, Students’ Problems. This is an openaccess article under the CC–BY-SA license 1. Introduction From the linguistic perspective, Syntax has a similar scope of study as morphology. They both study grammar. The difference is that morphology examines the grammatical relationships that exist in words to sentences. Meanwhile, syntax studies the grammatical relationships beyond word boundaries in sentence units. Syntax is the study of sentence structure. According to Fromkin et al., (2003), syntax is the aspect of grammar that reflects a speaker's understanding of the elements necessary for building phrases and sentences from morphemes and words. In line with this assertion, Carnie (2013) contended that syntax is the study of the level of language that exists between words and the meaning of utterances: sentences. It is the level that bridges the gap between the sounds someone makes (which are grouped into words) and what they need to express. These two theories indicate that syntax focuses on how sentences are constructed through several elements called phrases. Regarding the concept of the structure and elements of a sentence, Chomsky in 1957, coined and popularized the concept of transformational-generative grammar to describe a language analysis system that acknowledges the relationship between various sentence elements as well as among sentences in a language and expresses these relationships using processes or rules (some of which are called transformations). Chomsky (2002) clarified that the fundamental idea of transformational generative is the distinction between deep structure and surface structure, which is established by the application of a particular formal procedure through recursion, also known as "grammatical transformation" at the lowest basic object. doi :10.32585/ijelle.v5i1.3717 International Journal of English Linguistics, Literature, and Education (IJELLE) Vol.5, No. 1, June 2023, pp. 68-76 69 ISSN 2686-0120 (print), 2686-5106 (online) Fowler (2017) asserted that deep structure is related to meaning whereas surface structure is related to the arrangement of elements and hence to sound since, in practice, the surface structure indicates the order of sounds that appear in a phonetic realization of a sentence. Therefore, the deep structure is related to semantics while the surface structure is related to phonology, but both of them are discussed in sentence structure. On the other hand, Fowler (2017) also described transformational rules are used to underlying phrase markers to generate derived or surface phrase markers. As a result, phrase markers can indicate both deep and surface structures. A phrase marker is a tree diagram representation of an element in a sentence. In syntax, a tree diagram allows students to recognize the structure of a sentence and analyze it based on its surface structure and deep structure. The ability to draw syntactic tree diagrams can therefore be used as a measure of a student’s ability to analyze sentences and sentence structures. If they can illustrate each element of a sentence in a tree diagram, it indicates that they have a thorough understanding of each element, from the word level to phrases. Nevertheless, many students claimed that drawing tree diagrams is difficult. It is based on early observations made by the researchers among English Department students. This observation showed that, while some students believed that evaluating words using tree diagrams was simple, the majority of them still struggle with it. This fact inspires researchers to go deeper into the difficulty students have when analyzing simple sentences using tree diagrams, in order to identify the types of issues they face when learning syntax, particularly when analyzing sentences using tree diagrams. Some researchers conducted the research in the same area (syntactic tree diagram). Derrick & Archambault (2009) analyzed TreeForm: explaining and exploring grammar through syntax trees. The research focused on the treeform as a tool to develop the syntax trees; complete with movement lines, coreference, and feature association. In this research, the researcher asked several students and professors to draw a tree diagram using a treeform. Besides that, the researcher also asked them to draw a tree diagram using other tools. After that, the researcher analyzed the results by comparing the effectiveness of those tools. Therefore, the research aimed to determine whether the treeform was effective for developing tree diagrams or not. The other previous research was carried out by Wang (2010) who investigated the problems and suggestions related to learning about tree diagrams, entitled "Drawing Tree Diagrams: Problems and Suggestions." This study explored general problems that often occurred when students constructed tree diagrams. The research was conducted by reviewing the students' exam sheets and (...truncated)