ERROR ANALYSIS OF ENGLISH ESSAYS MADE BY THE FIFTH SEMESTER OF ENGLISH STUDENTS AT FACULTY OF HUMANITIES BUNG HATTA UNIVERSITY

Abstract

The study attempts to investigate the errors found in English essays written by 15 students. The subjects of this study were the fifth semester of English students at Faculty of Humanities, Bung Hatta University. This study uses qualitative method as basic of the research.The aims of this study is to identify the types of errors in the grammatical categories found in the essay writing tasks, as well as analyzing the categorizations of errors that cause to happen the interference of L1. There are some theories used to guide me in analyzing the data, they are Corder (1974) as a founder of error analysis states that error analysis is the part of investigation in learning process of language, Yanti (1997), Gass, (2013). The results show there are a number of types of errors, such as (1) tenses, (2) spelling, (3) gerund, (4) word choice, (5) word order, (6) the verb be. The errors were identified based on the error categorizations, such as from the sentence level errors, the element errors, and the main errors or the source of errors.

Keywords: error analysis, interference, grammatical categories, learning process.