THE ANALYSIS OF THE EIGHTH GRADE STUDENTS’ GRAMMATICAL ERRORS IN WRITING A RECOUNT TEXT AT SMP MUHAMMADIYAH 1 JEMBER IN THE 2015/2016 ACADEMIC YEAR

Abstract

In Indonesia, English is taught as a compulsory subject that must be learnt by Indonesian students. In learning English itself, Indonesian students never take apart with the term grammatical error especially in learning writing. Therefore, grammar as one of the English components must be taught in all schools because its role is significant to guide the students to be able to construct sentences correctly. Based on the preliminary study that was conducted on March 14th, 2016, it was reported that most of the students wrote ungrammatical sentences that make their writing confusing and the English teachers there also never analyze their students’ grammatical errors to know their students’ weaknesses in learning grammar so that they cannot make an improvement for it. Dealing with that problem, the researcher intended to conduct grammatical error analysis on the eighth grade students’ recount text writing at SMP Muhammadiyah 1 Jember for this research. Basically, the objectives of this research were to know and to describe the kinds of grammatical errors and the percentages made by the eighth grade students of SMP Muhammadiyah 1 Jember on recount text writing, and to describe the cause of the most grammatical error occurrence. This research was descriptive. The data of this research consisted of primary data, that were the students’ writing test results and supporting data that were obtained from interview and documentation with the English teacher to get the information about the students’ learning process dealing with grammar and writing. While documentation was done to know the total number and the names of the eighth grade students in that school so that the researcher could take samples by using lottery. The population of the eighth grade students at SMP Muhammadiyah 1 Jember in the 2015/2016 Academic Year was 130 students and the researcher took 30 students to represent the population as the respondents. The students’ writing analysis was done by giving codes on their errors found based on the error types that were omission, addition, misformation, and misordering. Then, the kinds of errors were counted. Based on the data analysis results, it could be reported that the total number of the whole grammatical error types made by the respondents was 273 errors. Those errors consisted of 46.5% or 127 error items for omission, 11% or 30 errors of addition, 32% or 87 errors of misformation, and 10.5% or 29 errors of misordering. Meanwhile, the kinds of grammatical errors found in respondents’ writings were omission errors in the forms of articles, verbs, plural markers (-s, -es), possessive inflection marker (‘s), possessive determiners, prepositions, and past tense inflection (-ed). Then, addition errors in the forms of double marking and simple addition consisting addition of plural markers, prepositions, verbs (be), and articles. Next, misformation errors in the forms of regularization (misformation of verbs and plural noun) and archi-forms. Finally, misordering errors consisted of misordering adverbs in the sentence, misordering ‘singular subject pronoun’ with ‘plural subject pronouns’ in an NP, misordering noun+noun in the sentence, and misordering the modifier of noun in the sentence. Furthermore, the highest errors or the most grammatical errors made by the eighth grade students of SMP Muhammadiyah 1 Jember in their writings was misformation errors in the form of regularization of verbs as many as 69 errors. Most of the students did not change the basic verbs into past tense verbs so that they used the wrong forms of the verbs in their writings. These errors were occurred because there was an intralingual transfer which caused by the target language itself. The students got confused with the target language, English that has so many rules compared to their native language so that they were confused and made errors. While the lowest errors were addition of plural markers and misordering the modifier noun + noun in a sentence as many as 1 error. Thus, it could be summarized that a lot of grammatical error types made by the research respondents need to be improved, especially on the errors that was mostly made by them.