LEXICAL ERRORS IN ENGLISH WRITING PRODUCED BY ENGLISH TEACHERS OF SMP NEGERI 1 KOTA GORONTALO AND SMP NEGERI 1 KABILA

This study aims to identify and determine lexical errors among junior high school English teachers in Gorontalo. The participants of the study consists of 13 English teachers that separated into two different schools: 7 teachers are from SMP Negeri 1 Kota Gorontalo, while 6 teachers are from SMP negeri 1 Kabila. Each English teacher was asked to write three kinds of text: recount text, descriptive text and persuasive text. Thus, there were 39 texts gathered as the data of this study. The result showed that formal errors are the most frequent major type of lexical errors that are found in the English teachers’ writings. Besides, misformations is the most frequent type of lexical errors that occurred in the text, followed by distortions and formal misselection. This means that some of English teachers still have difficulties in dealing with interlingual and intralingual errors. In addition, calque is the most frequent sub-types of lexical errors with 49 errors in total, followed by misselection with 29 errors in total and then omission with 15 errors in total. This indicates that the influence of mother-tongue is high. Also, the number of misspelling words is also high