A study on grammatical errors in the descriptive compositions of English produced by the seventh grade students of MTs. Al Wachid of Surabaya

This item is published by Universitas Islam Negeri Sunan Ampel Surabaya

Renata, Olivia Yuniar (2010) A study on grammatical errors in the descriptive compositions of English produced by the seventh grade students of MTs. Al Wachid of Surabaya. Undergraduate thesis, IAIN Sunan Ampel Surabaya.

Preview

Text
Olivia Yuniar Renata_D35205017.pdf
Download (2MB) | Preview

Official URL: http://digilib.uinsby.ac.id/id/eprint/22048

Abstract

In accordance with the standard competencies, one of genres of texts taught to the seventh grade students of Islamic Junior High School is descriptive text which is aimed to describe a particular person, thing, or place. Since it tells about factual events, one of the language features mostly used is simple present tense and other language features used in writing descriptive text. Therefore, the students of the seventh grade students are expected to master this tense well in order that they are able to produce a piece of descriptive writing with well-grammar. However, in learning language, the students cannot avoid themselves from making errors since it is regarded as a part of learning process. This study is conducted to describe the types and the causes of errors occurred in the students' descriptive writing and to calculate the percentage of those errors to know the frequency of their occurrence. The data taken from the documentations of daily test - task I and II are presented in the form of words and percentage. Thus, the research design of this study is descriptive qualitative. Here, the subjects are the seventh grade students of MTs. Al-Wachid of Surabaya, in both classes; A and B class. There are 25 students of each class produce the two tasks in different time, theme, and teaching technique, but, in this case, only 37 descriptive writing that will be analyzed since there are some students who do not do the task given and some others are absent. In this study, the researcher uses four theories; Linguistic Category Taxonomy by Burt and Kiparsky, and by Dulay, Burt and Krashen to identify the errors found, Surface Strategy Taxonomy by Dulay, Burt and Krashen to classify them, interlingua proposed by Wilkins and intralingua suggested by Richards to predict the causes of errors. The result of data analyzed shows that the most type of errors in the first task based on Linguistic Category Taxonomy belongs to be forms and articles as the least while in the second task, the most is simple present tense; verbal ending -s and the least is to infinitives and subject and number. According to Surface Strategy Taxonomy, the most frequent type of errors found in both tasks belongs to omission errors occured 49 times or 58.3% out of 84 errors in the first task and 60 times or 50.4% out of 119 errors in the second task, and the least is disordering errors 7 times or 8.3% in the first task and 9 times or 7.6% in the second task. The errors found are caused by interlingua and intralingua; over-generalization, ignorance of rules restriction, incomplete application of rules, and false concept hypothesized.