AN ERROR ANALYSIS ON THE DESCRIPTIVE TEXT WRITTEN BY SECOND SEMESTER OF ENGLISH DEPARTMENT STUDENTS AT 2009/2010 ACADEMIC YEAR FACULTY OF

Abstract

In the process of learning English as the second language, the students will certainly commit errors. There are several types of errors that the students produce. They are; omission, addition, misformation, and misordering. Those are the four types of errors to be focus of this research. This thesis is aimed at revealing the errors in written language made by the second semester students of English Department, at faculty of Letters of the 2009/2010 academic year. The data of this thesis is directly obtained from the chosen samples. The respondents are asked to write two descriptive paragraphs in which they should describe the physical appearance of a person they like most and the reason why they like him/ her. Then, the data are analyzed by applying three steps. They are; identifying, describing, and interpreting the errors. The result of research shows that there are 151 omission errors, 57 addition errors, 145 misformations, and 20 misorderings. The research result also shows that the dominant error that the students produce is omission error. It is indicated by its highest number instead of others. The omission errors that are produced by the students vary. Some of them omit the suffix –s or –es as the simple present tense verb marker and the suffix –d or –ed as the past tense verb marker. Some of the students also omit the suffix –s or –es to characterize the plural regular noun. While, some of them omit some important elements that should appear in well-formed utterances, such as; subject, verb, auxiliary, and preposition. Those errors probably occur because the students strongly interfered by their native language. Besides, they do not learn such kind of system in their native language.

Key words: error analysis, descriptive text, interlanguage.