The Analysis of the VIII a Students’ Grammatical Errors of Using Simple Present Tense in Writing Descriptive Paragraph at Smpn 2 Bondowoso

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.