| dc.description.abstract | In this globalization era, learning English is very important. In learning
English, there are four skills that should be mastered. One of those four skills is
writing. In writing skill, the students are expected to be able to express the idea and
also organize the idea into a good writing that can be easily understood by the
readers. However, they still face difficulties in organize the idea into a good writing.
They frequently make errors in their writing and the errors are mostly dealing with
the syntactical errors. In this case, analyzing their errors is an important way to do
because it can help them to improve their writing skill.
This research aimed at describing the types of syntactical errors and the most
dominant type and also the least type of syntactical errors found in the descriptive
paragraph writing made by the students of Class X IPA at MA Unggulan Nuris
Jember. Class X IPA was chosen as the research respondents purposively because the
students in that class had the highest average score among the others. Meanwhile, the
data of this research were collected through writing test, interview, and
documentation. The researcher used writing test in the form of writing a descriptive
paragraph to get the research data for the analysis. Meanwhile, the interview and
documentation were used to support the research finding. In addition, the data
obtained were analyzed by using the adapted steps stated by Corder (in Ellis and
Barkuizen, 2005:57).
In analyzing the students’ writing, the researcher used inter-rater reliability in
which the researcher as Rater 1 was helped by two other raters to get reliable result.
In classifying the types of syntactical errors, the researcher used the linguistic
category taxonomy stated in Dulay, Burt, and Krashen (1982:148-150). Meanwhile,
to calculate the percentage of each type of syntactical error, the researcher decided to
use the percentage statistical method based on Ali (1993:86).
The research results showed that there were twelve types of syntactical errors
made by the students of Class X IPA at MA Unggulan Nuris in their descriptive
paragraph writing. Those types of errors were the misuse of article, the omission of
article, the misuse of pronoun, the omission of pronoun, the omission of to be, the
misuse of preposition, the omission of preposition, the disagreement of subject and
verb, the error of word order, the misuse of plural marker, the misuse of simple verb
for V-ing (gerund), and the last is the other types of syntactical errors which could not
be found in the Linguistic Category Taxonomy.
The most syntactical error type shown by the highest percentage (30.7%)
made by the students of Class X IPA at MA Unggulan Nuris Jember in their
descriptive paragraph writing was the disagreement of subject and verb. Meanwhile,
the type of syntactical error that had the lowest percentage (0.7%) was the misuse of
plural marker. This type of syntactical error was regarded as the least syntactical error
type.
The finding of this research was also supported by the fact stated by the tenth
grade English teacher during the interview that the students still experienced
difficulties in grammar, mostly in the syntactical aspect. The teacher could focus on
how to teach the students so that they could deal with the agreement of subject and
verb because the most dominant syntactical error was on the disagreement of subject
and verb. This finding was also expected to be used as a reference for the English
teacher to pay more attention on the students’ writing especially on the use of
grammar and for the future researcher to conduct further research with the similar
problem in different research design and area. | en_US |
