The Study of Junior High School Students' Local and Global Errors in Writing Descriptive Text

Abstract

Language is a means of communicating between humans, both orally and in writing. In the process of teaching and learning English, writing ability is the most difficult and complicated language skill to be learned by almost all students at every level of education. Many people have their own opinion that writing is the most difficult skill in language learning. Based on Richards and Renandya (2002) writing is the most difficult skill for L2 learners to master. The difficulty lies not only in generating and organizing ideas but also in translating the ideas into readable text. L2 students have to pay attention to higher-level skills of planning and organizing as well as lower-level skills of spelling, punctuation, word choice, and so on. In this research, it was revealed that there were errors contained in students' writing in the form of student-made descriptive texts. The focus of the problem in this research includes (1) local error; and (2) global errors made by class 7C students at one of the state junior high schools in Jember in their descriptive texts. This research design is qualitative with a descriptive type. This research was carried out by recording data in the form of words and sentences. The results of this research can systematically and accurately describe local and global errors in class 7C descriptive text at one of the state junior high schools in Jember. The data used in this research are the words and sentences in the descriptive text of class 7C students at one of the state junior high schools in Jember. The data source used in this research is the descriptive text from class 7C students at that school. The data collection technique used in this research is the documentation method. The documentation in this research is descriptive text of class 7C students at one of the junior high schools in Jember. There are 72 errors found in local errors with 3 incorrect nouns and 17 incorrect verb inflections, 5 incorrect articles, 7 incorrect auxiliaries, 1 incorrect form of quantifier, and 39 other findings in local errors in various subtypes such as

conjunction, main verb, pronoun, plural, adjective, complement, and verb. There are 21 errors found in global error with 2 wrong word orders in major constituent, 2 missing cues to signal obligatory exceptions to pervasive syntactic rules, and 11 incorrect pronouns. And there are also 28 other mistakes found in the participants’ descriptive texts. Based on the findings, it can be assumed that the participants were confused about using English till they finally made the errors. It can be caused by English which has a different system compared to Indonesian. In using Indonesian, we don’t need to use grammar or any other difficult system of English, because Indonesian does not have a system like English does. Based on the results and discussion presented in the previous chapter, students' descriptive texts can be studied using error analysis in other languages and based on other taxonomies, for example lexical, semantic, and discourse, or based on linguistic category taxonomy, surface strategy taxonomy, comparative analysis taxonomy, and communicative effect taxonomy. The results of this research are aimed at junior high school English teachers who need to improve English language learning, especially in students' knowledge of writing skills so that they comply with correct grammar rules and use more appropriate word choices. Furthermore, it can be implemented in learning and discussions in language error analysis courses. For other researchers in the field of science, it can be used as reading material to carry out similar research.