The study on grammatical errors in the abstracts of “Ulul Albab” scientific journal

The study of grammatical errors in English writing has been done by many researchers. Error means any deviation from a selected norm of language performance, no matter what the characteristics or causes of the deviation might be. As well the studies that are conducted by those researchers, this study is also going to investigate the grammatical errors in the Abstracts of Ulul Albab Scientific Journal.

This research is very important to be conducted because Ulul Albab scientific journal is an academic journal that fills the ideas of the experts who search about religion, science, technology and others that some of the writers of this journal used English language on the abstracts of the articles. Since this journal is read by many people especially by the academics at nation wide universities, hence, it should be correctly written by standard English writing.

Errors are classified into four types, the first is linguistic category taxonomy, the second is surface strategy taxonomy, the third is communicative effect taxonomy, and the fourth is comparative taxonomy. This study intends to analyze grammatical errors based on surface strategy taxonomy specifically on morphological and syntactical errors, which includes four types of errors: omission, addition, misformation, and misordering.

In order to bring this study into its purpose, the researcher formulates the research problem: What types of grammatical errors occur in the abstract of “Ulul Albab” scientific journal.

This study is a library research and uses descriptive qualitative method. Descriptive qualitative tries to describe, identify, classify and tabulate the errors found in the abstracts of Ulul Albab scientific journal in constructing grammatical rules, which are obtained from the abstracts. Considering that, the design of this research is library research, the data are taken from the abstracts of Ulul Albab scientific journal volume 7, No. 2 2006. The instrument of this study is the researcher herself. It is because the data of this research are written data from the abstracts of Ulul Albab scientific journal.

This study found that the dominant mistakes on the abstracts are errors in omission types followed by addition errors, misformation and the last is misordering. Then, this study also found that the highest numbers of omission errors are omission of articles.