An Analysis of the Seventh Year Students’ Morphological Errors in Descriptive Paragraph Writing at SMPN 1 Kalibaru in the 2010/2011 Academic Year;

Abstract

Indonesian students learn English as a foreign language. In this case, English is rarely used in communication outside the classroom. As a result, the students often make some errors in their English writing. Therefore, the students need good writing ability to make the readers understand his ideas. The readers can only understand the message in writing if the writer can arrange, explain, and tell his ideas briefly and orderly with good organization, diction, and structure. In addition, grammar becomes one of the English components that is closely related to writing skill. The writer should express his ideas in correct and appropriate sentences so the reader understands what he means. However, it is difficult to make good sentences. The students often make grammatical errors, especially morphological errors, because English grammar has different systematic rules from Indonesian grammar. This research was a descriptive quantitative research. The purpose of the research were to describe the types of morphological errors in descriptive paragraph writing made by the students, the percentage of each type of morphological errors in descriptive paragraph writing made by the students, and the most morphological error in descriptive paragraph writing made by the students. Then, the results would be explained qualitatively. Moreover, the research sample was taken through proportional random sampling by lottery as many as 15% from the population. Thus, the number of the samples taken was 35 students. Data collection method was applied in this research by three ways. They were writing test, interview, and documentation. In addition, there were some steps of error xiii xiv analysis: 1) collecting errors data, 2) identifying errors data, 3) classifying and explaining errors data, and 4) evaluating errors data. The results of the data showed that there are four types of morphological errors in descriptive paragraph writing made by the seventh year students of SMPN 1 Kalibaru in the 2010/2011 academic year. They are plural inflection errors as many as 66 errors (56.41 %), the third person singular verb inflection errors as many as 26 errors (22.22 %), possesive inflection errors as many as 7 errors (5.98 %), and present participle inflection errors as many as 18 errors (15.38). And, the most morphological error in descriptive paragraph writing made by the students was the plural inflection errors as many as 56.41 % of whole errors. It could be said that the students still made some morphological errors in the descriptive paragraph writing. This errors might happen since the teacher did not use other media except the book in teaching English to the students. The teacher used the rooms available in that school, but he did not completely used the media. Besides, he should also give remedial teaching to the students that have not mastered the materials yet, especially the materials that deal with descriptive writing and morphological aspect. For that reason, the remedial teaching can minimize the students’ morphological errors in their descriptive writing.