AN ERROR ANALYSIS IN THE USE OF SIMPLE PAST TENSE IN WRITING RECOUNT TEXT

Abstract Writing is one of four English skills besides listening, reading, speaking, and writing. Writing is the most difficult for the teachers and students from those four language skill taught at elementary school to the university level. The difficulties are in generating idea as well as in translating ideas into readable text. there are components to product the writing text well: punctuation, grammar, and mechanics.The method used in this research was a descriptive study included as qualitative research. Furthermore, the data were collected through test, interview both students and english teacher. The purpose of this study were to find out their frequency of occurrence and to find out the sources of errors which students made in using the simple past tense in writing recount text.The result of the data, showed that students commited errors into four types: omission. Addition, misformation, and misordering. From the frequency of each error types, misformation was the error which most frequently produced by the students. It took 52.5 % of the total errors. Moreover, 26.7 % errors fell into omission and 16.8 % errors fell into addition. Whereas, for error of ordering it only took 4.9%. These errors were conducted because most of students still influenced by their mother tongue (Interlingual transfer). Besides, errors occured because students generalized the rule and applied it incompletely (intralingual transfer). The implication of this research give direction and the alternative to teacher in implementation error analysis for english classroom. In future, it provides the advantages to developing the teaching method for English teachers’ professional development. Keywords: Error analysis, simple past tense, recount text