An Analysis of Grammatical Errors Made by the Second Year Students in Writing Complex Sentences with Adjective Clause at English Education Department of Bung Hatta University

Abstrak

Writing is one of the important communicative skills but rather difficult to develop. The difficulty of writing involves that the students do not have enough ability on vocabularies, grammar, punctuation, spelling of words, choosing of words, and arranging the words in the sentences. Relating to this, the researcher was interested in doing research about the second year students’ grammatical errors in writing complex sentences with adjective clause.

The population of this research was the second year students at English Education Department of Bung Hatta University. The total number of population members of this research was 27 students. The researcher used total sampling technique because the number of cases being investigated was small. The instrument used was writing test and the correlation coefficient of the test was 0.99. It means that the test was reliable.

The results of this research showed that the students made some errors. There were 87.5 (19.40%) errors in omission, 37.5 (8.31%) errors in addition, 230 (51%) errors in misformation, and 96 (21.29%) errors in misordering. In specific, there are 10 (2.22%) errors in omission of verb of all errors, 30.5 (6.76%) errors in omission of article of all errors, 13 (2.88%) errors in omission of preposition of all errors, and 34 (7.54%) errors in omission of –be of all errors, 17 (3.76%) errors in addition of –be of all errors, 4.5 (1%) errors in addition of article of all errors, 5 (1.11%) errors in addition of verb of all errors, and 11 (2.44%) errors in addition of preposition of all errors, 118 (26.16%) errors in misformation of verb of all errors, 23 (5.10%) errors in misformation of relative pronoun of all errors, 22 (4.88%) errors in misformation of –be of all errors, 5 (1.11%) errors in misformation of article of all errors, and 62 (13.75%) errors in misformation of noun of all errors, 96 (21.29%) errors in misordering of adjective clause or adjective phrase of all errors, 0 (0%) errors in misordering of verb phrase of all errors, 0 (0%) errors in misordering of –be of all errors, and 0 (0%) errors in misordering of modal auxiliary of all errors.

Based on the results of this research, the researcher concluded that the students made some errors. Dealing with the conclusion, the researcher suggests lecturers to give more exercises to write writing complex sentences with adjective clause. The students are suggested to learn and practice more in writing complex sentences with adjective clause.

Key Words: Students’ Problem, Writing, Complex Sentence, Adjective Clause