A STUDY ON THE AMBIGUITY FOUND IN ENGLISH TEST FOR JUNIOR HIGH SCHOOL STUDENTS

This study is aimed at describing the types of ambiguity found in English exercise books for junior high school students, the frequency of each types of ambiguity, and the way to disambiguate of the ambiguous sentences. In collecting data, the writer uses reading and observing the English tests on English exercise books for junior high school entitled Basis, Inovasi, Mandiri, Merpati, Sportif, Talenta, and Pidjar and presenting, and putting them into a list of data. There are 48 ambiguous sentences as the data of this study. The writer analyzes the types of ambiguity found in English exercise books for junior high school students, the frequency of each types of ambiguity, and the way to disambiguate of the ambiguous sentences. The results of this study show that lexical ambiguity attains 25 ambiguous sentences or about 52,1%, further surface structure ambiguity achieves 18 ambiguous sentence or 37,5 %, and the last, deep structure ambiguity achieves 5 ambiguous sentences or 10,4%. From the percentage of each types of ambiguity, the writer concludes that the dominant ambiguous sentences appeared in the data is lexical ambiguity with the total number of ambiguous sentences are 25 ambiguous sentences (52, 1%). The last, the writer finds the methods to disambiguate the ambiguous sentence, namely; paraphrasal selection and truth conditional selection. Both of methods expected to resolve the problem about ambiguous sentences in the English exercise books for junior high school students.