The Analysis of Grammatical Error on Descriptive Texts Written by the Tenth Grade Students of SMA Negeri 1 Purwokerto in the Academic Year 2019/2020

Abstract

This study aims to identify various grammatical errors based on Linguistic Category Taxonomy and Surface Strategy Taxonomy, for their tendency of occurrence in the texts and to find out various kinds of student problems when writing text in English. This study is qualitative-quantitative research with an instrument in descriptive text written test essays and questionnaires from the tenth-grade students of SMA Negeri 1 Purwokerto. Then, the texts are analyzed based on Dulay’s theory. From the results in text analysis, the writers find 4 types of grammatical errors by Dulay’s theory. The 4 types of errors are Omission (54.9%), Misordering (23.75%), Misformation (15.93%), and Addition (6.07%), with the total errors is 182 errors. The problems faced by students are low grammar mastery, low vocabulary mastery, low in composing sentences, and sentence pattern still influenced by mother tongue. As a result, the students still write text using the original or Indonesian sentence structure.