Article errors on Writing III essays of English Department Students

Communication can be done through spoken and written forms. There are four language skills in learning English, reading, listening, speaking, and writing. The students think that writing is the most difficult language skill to be mastered because the writer needs to be knowledgeable in grammar, vocabulary, and spelling. Articles have an important role in English writing. The use of articles supports an understanding between the writer and reader; enabling the reader to locate where a noun or noun phrase is as well as identify if it is already understood. However, many students still do not know how to use articles correctly when they write a sentence. The purpose of this study is to find out the article errors in Explanation texts that the students made and the possible causes of the errors. The subjects were the Writing III students of the English Department of Widya Mandala Catholic University Surabaya and the data sources were their Explanation texts. The result was among the 45 students, 36 students committed error. The finding of this study showed that it consisted of 49 (48.04%) errors of addition, 39 (38.24%) errors of omission, and 14 (13.76%) errors of substitution. The errors were article ‘the’ 59 errors, article ‘a’ 38 errors, and article ‘an’ 5 errors. The causes of the errors were L1 Interference 33 errors (27%), ignorance of rule restrictions 31 (26%) and false concepts hypothesized 57 errors (47%).