An Analysis of the Second Year Students’ Grammatical Errors in Writing a Descriptive Paragraph at English Department of Bung Hatta University

Abstrak

Writing is one of  language skills that is placed at the last among the four language skills. Writing is an activity of someone to express his or her ideas, feelings, and opinions in written form. Writing involves the encoding of a message, that is, we translate our thoughts into a language (Byrne in Mochtar 2005:229). It means that when we are writing we transfer something in our minds to a form that can be read by others.

The purpose of this research was to describe the second year students’ grammatical errors in writing a descriptive paragraph at English Department of Bung Hatta University. In this research the researcher focused the research on types of grammatical errors such as omission, addition, misformation, and misordering in writing descriptive paragraph used place and person at English Department of Bung Hatta University. Descriptive method was used as the design of this research. The population of this researcher was the second year students at English Department of Bung Hatta University. The researcher used total sampling to select the sample and the total number of sample members was 24 students. The instrumenused to get the data was the writing test. To know the reliability of the test, the researcher used inter-rater technique. The reliability index of the test was 0.99. It means the test was reliable.

The result of analyzing data showed that the second year students at English Department of Bung Hatta University made grammatical errors in omission, addition, and misformation in writing a descriptive paragraph. The researcher divided grammatical errors made by the second year students at English Department of Bung Hatta University into four types. There were 15 (62.5%) students who made grammmatical errors of omission consisting of omission of article, omission of plural, omission of be, omission of s/es third singular person and omission of noun, 1 (4.16%) student who made grammatical errors of addition consisting of addition of word, 8 (33.33%) students who made grammmatical errors of misformation consisting of misformation of verb, misformation of be and misformation of subject, 0 (0%) students who made grammatical errors of misordering.

In line with such conclusion, the researcher suggests the lecturers to minimize the students grammatical errors by giving more exercises in writing descriptive paragraph, especially in applying article. For the students, they are suggested to learn more and do the exercises in writing descriptive paragraph. They also should know about grammatical errors they might do in writing so that they can be aware of making grammatical errors especially grammatical errors in omission. The next researchers are suggested to study the causes of grammatical errors made by the students in writing especially grammatical errors in omission.

Keywords : writing, grammatical errors,  descriptive paragraph