Students' competence in using sentence variety as reflected in their essays

In English language learning, people learn the four skills of English: writing, listening, speaking, and reading. As one of the language skills, writing is, however, not easy. The written products have to be interesting for other people to read. Having the same sentence pattern of writing will make the essay monotonous and boring. There are many methods that can make writing interesting. One of the methods is using sentence variety. The writer is, therefore, interested to find how Writing IV students begin their sentences. Whether the students use sentence variety to begin their sentence or they use subject first in their essay. The writer categorize the sentence beginnings into nine groups namely, subject, infinitive, a present participle, a past participle, a prepositional phrase, an adverb, a dependent clause, a transitional word, and inversion. \nThis study is classified as a descriptive study. The data source in this study are taken from the compositions of the fifth semester English Department students of Widya Mandala Catholic University, they belong to 2014-2015 academic year. To be specific, the data are from their Writing IV final-term test, in which the students are required to write a problem-solution essay or review essay. There are three writing classes with 49 students in total. The writer classifies the sentence beginnings into nine categories, namely subject-first, infinitive, present participles, past participles, prepositional phrases, adverbs, dependent clauses, transitional words, and inversion. \nAfter analyzing the data, the writer counted the occurrence of each sentence beginning types. The writer found out that there were 1410 sentences in total. Eight hundred ninety two (63.26%) sentences begin with subjects-first, one hundred fifty (10.64 %) sentences begin with transitional words, one hundred thirty eight (9.79%) sentences begin with prepositional phrases, one hundred eleven (7.87%) sentences begin with dependent clauses, seventy six (5.39 %) sentences begin with adverbs, twenty six (1.85%) sentences begin with inversions, eleven (0.78%) sentences begin with infinitives, four (0.28%) sentences begin with present participles, and two (0.14%) sentences begin with past participles. \nThe writer finds that the most sentence beginnings used by the Writing IV students is subject-first and they rarely used other sentence beginnings in their essay. The writer suggests that the lecturer give them more worksheet about sentence variety. Students are suggested to do lots of exercises for sentence variety at the self-access laboratory. Further researchers can analyze sentence variety in the sentence length.