Error analysis in the use of Simple Past Tense in the second semester students' Narrative Writing

Writing is also not an easy skill to be mastered instantly, it takes practice and perseverance to make a story that is eligible to the reader. Narrative text is one of the genres in English. Narrative text can be both fiction or can be the combination of the writer’s experience. In narrative text, there is a complication and the resolution. Moreover, it has moral value to be delivered to the reader. \nSimple past tense is one of the tenses that have been taught to Indonesian students since junior high school. However, since Indonesian language doesn’t have tenses system, it is quite difficult for students to use simple past tense appropriately. Even among university students who are studying in English Department, they still make errors in their narrative writing. \nThis present study aims to find out what types of error and the possible source of errors found in students narrative writing. Moreover, this study aims to find out the average errors made by 48 subjects. The subject of this study is 48 students of Second semester students who were taking Writing 1 Subject and joined Narrative Writing Competition. The researcher collected data by listing all the errors found in simple past tense sentences in students’ work. \nThe result of the study related to the type of errors is 82.5% errors found in students work is misformation, 8.2% is omission, 7.4% is addition and 1.9% is misordering. For the possible source of error, 76.7% is the communication strategies, 20.7% is intralanguage transfer, 2.6% is interlanguage. \nA further analysis was then administered to discuss the finding in both type of errors and source of errors.