AN ANALYSIS OF GRAMMATICAL ERRORS IN WRITING RECOUNT TEXT MADE BY STUDENTS OF AIR-LANGGA COURSE IN SENGKALING

Keyword : Error, Grammar, Recount Text English is an international language, which becomes widely used throughout the world as formal or informal communication. It is a subject which is taught in many countries, including Indonesia. The teaching learning process of English includes four basic skills. Those are speaking, reading, listening and writing. Among the four skills, writing is a complex subject, and many people claim that writing is hard to be done. It is because writing is a difficult subject and it requires special skills in the production. Those special skills are in the word choice, the use of structure, the mechanic, and the rhetoric. The complexity of writing often leads some students to make some errors such as grammatical errors. The grammatical errors done by students happen in several types of writing. In order to minimize the errors, students need a place to learn more about grammar itself. This study was focused on analyzing grammatical errors in writing recount text made by students of Air-Langga course in Sengkaling especially on the errors based on surface strategy taxonomy that are errors of addition, errors of omission, errors of misformation, and errors of misordering. The purposes of the study were to define the types of grammatical errors and to investigate the most dominant grammatical error in writing recount text made by students of Air-Langga course in Sengkaling. In this study, the researcher used the descriptive design because she just wanted to analyze grammatical errors in writing recount text made by students of Air-Langga course in Sengkaling. The research subject of this study was junior high school students at Air-Langga course in Sengkaling. This course offered three classes of junior high school students; they are class 7, class 8 and class 9. The researcher just took class 9 as a subject of this study. The researcher applied a document analysis as instrument of this study. The instrument used to collect the data were document analysis of studentsÂ’ writing task about recount text. The conclusion of this study was the students made 241 errors as the total number of four types of errors divided into 137 or 56.85% errors of omission, 42 or 17.43% errors of addition, 35 or 14.52% errors of misformation, and 27 or 11.20% errors of misordering. It was clear that the most dominant error made by class 9 students of Air-Langga course in Sengkaling was error of omission. Those errors were caused by the differences in rules at the first language or the native language (Bahasa Indonesia) and the rules of the target language (L2). There were some English language rules which were not applied by the students and they also used Indonesian structure in their writing recount text. Almost all of the students did not understand how to use English grammar well. Accordingly, the students had to conquer the target language by doing the grammar exercises more in order to be able to avoid those errors.