An Error Analysis On Students’ Descriptive Writing of the Eleventh Grade Students of Smait Nururrahman Depok In 2015/2016 Academic Year

febriana widiartini; drs. zuhad ahmad, m.pd.; tri setyaningsih, m.pd.;

SALMA NURHANIFAH. NIM: 1101065089. An Error Analysis On
Students’ Descriptive Writing of the Eleventh Grade Students of Smait Nururrahman Depok In 2015/2016 Academic Year. A Paper; The English Study Programme of English Department, The School of Teacher’s Training and Education, The University of Muhammadiyah Prof. Dr. HAMKA (UHAMKA), Jakarta, 2015.
The objective of the research is to find out the grammatical error that the students
mostly make in their descriptive paragraph. The samples of this research were
22 students in class XI IPA. The writer asked the students to write a descriptive text about people.
The writer found that the types of error that are always made by the students at SMAIT Nururrahman Depok in their writing are singular-plural (3.86%) word form (7.72%) word choice (16.90%) verb tense (13.40%) add a word (7.25%) omit a word (7.72%) word order (1.44%) incomplete sentence (2.41%) spelling (2.89%) punctuation (3.86%) capitalization (22.22%) article (6.28%) meaning not clear (1.44%) and run on sentence (2.89%). Moreover, the percentage of the sources of error is as follow: intralingual transfer (38.64%), communication strategy (6.76%), interlingual transfer (28,5%) and context of learning (27,05%).
The result indicates that most of the students still confuse about the rules of capitalization and have a low range of vocabulary and therefore need to be exposed to English writing more to improve their vocabulary. The teacher may also need to give some remedial teaching to give the students clearer understanding regarding the common errors they made.