An Error Analysis of Students’ Descriptive Writing on the Tenth Grade Students of the SMAN 87 Jakarta in the 2014/2015 Academic Year.

sapiudin shidiq; drs. zuhad ahmad, m.pd; heni novitasari, m.pd;

GHYACITRA PITALOKA. NIM: 1101065147. An Error Analysis of Students’
Descriptive Writing on the Tenth Grade Students of the SMAN 87 Jakarta in the
2014/2015 Academic Year. A paper; The Study Programme of English Education,
The school of Teacher Training and Education, The University of Muhammadiyah
Prof. Dr. Hamka (UHAMKA), Jakarta, 2015
The objective of the study was to identify the types of errors, to identify the
most frequent errors made based on the students’ writing of descriptive text, and
to find out the interrelated source of errors made by tenth grade students of
SMAN 87 Jakarta in the 2014/2015 academic year.
The method of the study was qualitative descriptive study. The samples of
this study were the 25 students in the class of X MIA 1. To differentiate the errors
and mistakes, the writer took the data twice. The writer used Azar’s theory and
Norrish’s theory in analyzing the data.
The writer found that the most typical errors that had been done by the
students were about Punctuation around 84 (22.04%), Capitalization around 60
(15.74%), Verb Tense around 59 (15.48%), Add a Word around 42 (11.02%),
Word Choice around 34 (8.92%), Omit a Word around 29 (7.61%), Spelling
around 24 (6.29%), Singular-plural and Run on Sentence around 12 (3.14%),
Article around 11 (2.88%), Incomplete Sentence around 8 (2.09%), Meaning not
Clear around 4 (1.04%), Word Order and Word Form around 1 (0.26%). Beside
that, the biggest source of error was carelessness around 188 (49.34%). Next, First
Language Interference around 119 (31.23%), and the last was Translation around
74 (19.42%). Referring to the result above, the writer concluded that the teacher at
the tenth grade in SMAN 87 Jakarta need to give more explanation and exercises
in learning about grammar, especially for the using of punctuation because most
of students were being careless. The benefits of this study are to give the
information of the typical errors, the sources of errors made by the students, to
give the appropriate remedial teaching, and to reduce the students’ errors.