AN ERROR ANALYSIS OF THE STUDENTS’ DESCRIPTIVE WRITING ON THE EIGHTH GRADE OF SMPN 193 JAKARTA IN THE 2014/2015 ACADEMIC YEAR

nuraini diah maulina; drs. siswana, m. pd.; nurhandayani, m. pd.;

IRMA LEILA. NIM 1001065105. An Error Analysis of the Students’ Descriptive Writing on the Eighth Grade of SMPN 193 Jakarta in the 2014/2015 Academic Year. A paper: Jakarta, The Study Programme of English Education. The School of Teachers Training and Education. The University of Muhammadiyah Prof. Dr Hamka, Jakarta, 2014.
The objective of the study is to find out the most typical errors and sources of errors which were made by the eighth grade students of SMPN 193 East Jakarta in their descriptive writing. The population of this study was the eighth grade which consists of 30 students as the sample.
The method is used in this study is a descriptive analytical method. The writer administered a guided task on descriptive writing. Moreover, to differentiate error and mistake, the writer asked the students to do the same task on different day. The students wrote paragraphs based on the instruction which is given by the writer. After getting the data, the writer analyzed the error based on grammatical aspects.
The study showed that the most typical errors done by the eighth grade students were capitalization 49.57 %. The second place is punctuation 20.01 % and the third is add a word 6.30 %. According to the typical errors above, the writer found that the most sources which cause the students making errors are context of learning with 69.74 %, intralingual transfer with 25.63 %, interlingual transfer with 4.20 % and communication strategies with 0.42 %. The benefits of the research are to inform the teacher and to know about common errors which were made by the students. By reading the result of this study, the teacher can teach descriptive writing more innovative to reduce the errors in descriptive writing.