Grammatical Error Analysis of Descriptive Paragraph Writing Made by the Second Year Students of Social Science of SMAN 3 Jember in the 2005 / 2006 Academic Year

Abstract

The research was aimed to answer the general and the specific research problems covering what types of grammatical errors, what types of syntactical and morphological errors and what the most syntactical and morphological error type found in the descriptive paragraph writing. The respondents were the second year students of social science of SMAN 3 Jember in the 2005 / 2006 academic year. The grammatical errors consisted of syntactical and morphological errors, as the main data of the research, were elicited from the descriptive paragraph writing gathered from a writing test, while the supporting data was gained through an interview with the English teacher and documentation. The procedure of the data analysis were identifying the syntactical and morphological errors, clasifying the errors into the categories of syntactical and morphological errors, finding the percentage of the errors, and consulting the errors into the table of the classification level of error types. From the data analysis it was found that (1) The types of grammatical errors found in the students' paragraph were the syntactical and morphological errors. (2) The syntactical error types found in the students' writing were the simple present tense errors, the misuse of using articles, the simple past tense errors, the misuse of word order, the misuse of using prepositions, and the misuse of using verb form after modal auxiliaries. The syntactical error type predominating the others was the misuse of articles with 31.58 % in the medium classification level. For morphological errors, the errors found were the errors of plural inflection markers, the errors of possessive inflection markers, the errors of the third person singular verb inflection markers, and the errors of the past tense inflection markers. The morphological error type predominating other types was the errors of the third person singular verb inflection markers with 42.31 % in the high classification level. This fact underlies the necessity of giving enrichments of grammar rule and convenience to the learners while exposing them in developing descriptive paragraph especially in the error area of articles and third person singular verb inflection markers.