dc.description.abstract | The teaching of English in the eighth grade students of Junior High School
covers four language skills. From those four skills, writing is an important skill to
learn by the students because they will produce the writing by using a new language.
However, the students still make many grammatical errors in writing English texts
like the errors of using simple present tense in writing descriptive paragraphs. There
must be some causes that make students produce errors that need to be known. Errors
are usually made by English learners because they do not use English in their daily
life and they are still in the process of learning the language. Based on the
preliminary study conducted on August 26
th
2016, it was found that the students make
many grammatical errors on the use of simple present tense in writing descriptive
paragraphs.
This research deals with grammatical errors analysis. The objectives of the
research were to describe the gramnmatical errors on the use of simple present tense
made by the VIII A students at SMPN 2 Bondowoso and to know what causes the
errors.
Purposive Sampling was used in this research to select 39 students of VIII A
Class as the research respondents from the total number of the 238 population. The
consideration of choosing the respondents was because the class has the lowest score
in English Writing subject. The average English score of this class is 65. The data
were taken from a writing test in which the students had to write a descriptive
paragraph based on the topic given that was “My Pet”. Besides, interview and
documentation were also applied to get the data on the process of teaching and
learning of English Writing in the eight grade classes. From the result of data analysis, it was found that the students made 183
errors which consisted of 86 omission errors, 31 addition errors, 58 misformation
errors and 8 misordering errors. From the result, it was found that the most common
errors made by the students was omission. The omission errors occured around 47%
of the total errors made by the students. Each type of errors has the subtypes of errors.
They are: omission (to be, suffix -s/-es to the third singular person’s verb, verb,
subject), addition (double to be, to be, suffix -s/-es to the verb), misformation
(inappropriate form of to be, inappropriate use of singular and plural form,
inappropriate use of verb and inappropriate use of subject) and misordering. The most
frequent error found in the data analysis was the subtype of omission errors that is
omission of suffix –s/–es for the third singular person’s verb.
It was also found that the errors were caused by interlanguage errors and
intralanguage errors. In interlanguage cause, the students made errors because they
still thought of their first language when they produced a writing in another language
(English) and because some items in the new language they learned did not exist in
their native language. Meanwhile, in term of intralanguage cause, the students had
known the system or the rule in the new language but they could not develop it well.
Finally, the writer proposes some suggestions to the English teacher and to
future researcher. It is suggested to the English teacher to have more effective
strategy/ technique in teaching students to use tenses correctly in their writing like by
collecting errors and listing the common errors from students’ works. The teacher can
show the common errors to students and ask them to make error-correction in order to
lead them to review independently and be aware of the same errors which may occur.
In so doing, they can overcome their errors in omitting suffix –s/–es for the verb of
singular person subject. For the future researchers who are interested in discussing the
same topic, it is suggested to have a different method of investigation to find the
cause of errors by conducting interview to students or by delivering questionnaires to
students in order to get in depth data analysis of why actually the students made
errors. | en_US |