GRES PETRISYA KATO Pengarang Tans Feliks Dosen Pembimbing 1 Merlyn K. Nelloe Dosen Pembimbing 2 Alexander Home Kabelen Ketua Penguji Tans Felix Penguji 1 MERLYN K NELLOE Penguji 2

The objectives of this research were to identify the students’ ability in writing descriptive text, to find out the difficulties faced by students in writing the text and to find out the students’ strengths in writing descriptive text. This research used a qualitative research method. The subject of this research was 30 students of the grade eight of SMPN 4Kupang in school year 2023/2024. The researcher used writing tests and interviews as the instrument to collect data. The qualitative data obtained from the result of the test were analyzed to know the students' ability in writing descriptive text. The criteria of ability were determined by using the classification of ability by Arikunto. The result of the interview was used to get the answer of the second and third research question. The findings of this research were: (1) Students’ ability in writing descriptive text was in the level of good criteria with the main score of 69,2. (2) Difficulties that were faced by the students in writing descriptive text were the problems of writing they are lack of vocabulary, grammatical mistake and organizing idea. Those problems were caused by the student’s lack of practice and motivation in writing descriptive texts. (3) Strengths that were students have in writing descriptive text was students can recognize the object to be described and also they can arrange words well into sentences. Keywords: Ability, Difficulties, Strengths, Writing, Descriptive Text.