An Error Analysis of Descriptive Text Writing of the Eighth Grade Students of SMP Islam Kemuliaan West Jakarta in the 2015/2016 Academic Year

tand badoc michael; drs. h. bahrul hasibuan, m.ed; tri setyaningsih, m.pd.;

HAFIZA NURAENY 1101065148. An Error Analysis of Descriptive Text Writing of the Eighth Grade Students of SMP Islam Kemuliaan West Jakarta in the 2015/2016 Academic Year. The paper, The Study Programme of English Education, The School of Teacher Training and Education, The University of Muhammadiyah Prof. DR. Hamka, Jakarta 2016. The objective of this study is to find the empirical evidence of the errors and the causes of errors which students made in their descriptive writing. In this study, the writer used descriptive analytical method. The population of this study was 68 of the eighth grade students of SMP Islam Kemuliaan. The samples were taken from one class of the eighth grade, it is VIII-1 class which consists of 30 students. The students were asked to write a small descriptive paragraph which then the writer analyzed to find the types and causes of their errors. The writer found that most of grammatical errors which students made in their writing were: capitalization (48.8%), punctuation (19.6%), omit a word (10.5%), spelling (6.4%), meaning not clear (3.5%), add a word (2.9%), word choice (2.7%), word order (1.3%), verb tense (1,3%), singular-plural (0.8%), article (0.8%), word form (0.5%), run on sentence (0,5%), incomplete sentence (0.3%). In addition, the percentage of the sources of error are as follow: context of learning (69.2%), interlingual transfer (14.7%), intralingual transfer (10.5%), and communication strategies (5.6%). The result indicates that the most of the students still have low range of capitalization and punctuation. Therefore, the teacher may also give the students more explanation, practice and remedial teaching toward their errors in English writing especially how to use capital letters and punctuations in writing. The teacher give some remedial teaching to the students such as, the teacher gives the detail explanation about punctuation and capital letters to students and also give the example how to use them in writing.