THE SYNTACTICAL ERROR ANALYSIS OF CLASS X IPA STUDENTS’ DESCRIPTIVE PARAGRAPH WRITING AT MA UNGGULAN NURIS JEMBER

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.