Grammatical errors made by the third year students of the State Junior High School 1 Leces

ABSTRACT

This study investigates grammatical error in descriptive text of the Third Year Students of the State Junior High School 1 Leces especially the Third Level of A class. The objectives of this study are to find out the kinds of grammatical error in students’ writings and describe the dominant grammatical errors found. This study intends to analyze grammatical errors based on linguistic category taxonomy specifically on morphological and syntactical errors.

This study uses descriptive qualitative approach. The data collected from the students of the Third Year Students of the State Junior High School 1 Leces especially from the Third Level of A class of descriptive text. The researcher has chosen this text as the data sources of this study because he wanted to know whether or not the Third Year Students of the State Junior High School 1 Leces still got difficulties on grammar focus. The data were collected with several steps which have been done by the researcher, the researcher observed the Third Year Students of the State Junior High School 1 Leces especially the students from the Third Level of A class by giving a worksheet for writing descriptive text activities done by the students. The observation was done once in a month started from June and ended on July. This step is to make sure the relevant with this research and get good understanding based on statement of the problems and comprehending the data.

After getting the data needed by giving worksheet for making descriptive text, the researcher read all of the worksheets of the data to get general description of it. The researcher identified and classified the potentials data based on grammatical errors. After that the researcher analyses each data focusing with the problem of the study. In analyzing them the researcher described the content of selected text with the types of grammatical forms using linguistic strategy taxonomy proposed by Dulay.

Then the researcher categorized and discussed the finding of grammatical errors found in the Third Year Students of the State Junior High School 1 Leces. And he measured the frequency of grammatical error types to find the errors which mostly appeared in students writing. In this case, the function of percentage is to support the description of the data. Finally, the researcher found grammatical errors which are dominantly found in the data to make the conclusion for the research focus.

The result of this study shows that there are common mistakes made by the students in the writing. The first is syntax. The most predominant type of error in syntax is noun phrase followed by verb phrase, verb and verb construction. The number of error in syntax is 86 errors. It consist of four categories, in noun phrase is found 60 errors, in verb phrase is found 20 errors, in verb and verb construction is found 2 errors, some transformations are found 2 errors and Word Order is found 2 errors. Then, it is followed by morphology. The most pre dominant type of error is Third Person Singular Verb. It is found 11 errors.

This study aims to give a beneficial contribution for English student who are going to continue in studying grammar and writing. They should improve their own performance in those grammatical categories by reading more additional books and doing some practices through variety of exercises. For English teacher they are expected to pay more attention to the students’ problems in constructing sentences in their writing especially to the difficult grammatical categories such as the use of article, third person singular, verb, and simple past.

The researcher suggests that the next researcher focus their studies on the other aspects, which are not covered in this study. The researcher hopes that the result of the study are going to lead the next researcher who conduct the same field of research as the reference or comparison.