An analysis of students' grammatical errors in their descriptive writing

Abstrak. Penelitian ini bertujuan untuk mencari tahu i) jenis kesalahan yang siswa buat yang tergolong surface strategy taxonomy dan communicative effect taxonomy dalam menulis karangan deskriptif, serta ii) menyelidiki jenis kesalahan yang sering dan jarang muncul pada karangan siswa tersebut. Penelitian ini bersifat qualitatif. Subjek penelitian ini adalah 29 siswa kelas XI IPA1 dari SMA Yadika Bandar Lampung. Tes menulis digunakan sebagai instrumen penelitian. Hasil menunjukkan bahwa siswa membuat semua jenis kesalahan dari surface strategy taxonomy, yaitu omission, addition, misformation, and misordering; maupun communicative effect taxonomy, yaitu kesalahan global dan lokal. Dalam surface strategy taxonomy, jenis kesalahan yang sering muncul adalah misformation; dan jenis yang jarang muncul adalah misordering. Dalam communicative effect taxonomy, jenis kesalahan yang dominan adalah kesalahan lokal, sedangkan kesalahan global merupakan jenis kesalahan yang jarang terjadi.Abstract. This study aimed at finding out i) the types of error that learners committed in terms of surface strategy and communicative effect taxonomies in their descriptive writing; and ii) the types of errors the students most and least frequently used in their writing on the basis of both taxonomies. This study was a qualitative research. The subjects were 29 learners of class XI IPA 1 of SMA Yadika Bandar Lampung. The writing test was used as the instrument. The findings revealed that the learners committed all error types in terms of surface strategy taxonomy: omission, addition, misformation, and misordering; and communicative effect taxonomy: global and local errors. In terms of surface strategy taxonomy, misformation was the most frequent error type the students committed, while misordering was the least frequent error type. In terms of communicative effect taxonomy, the most dominant error type was local errors; while the least frequent error type was global errors.Keywords: communicative effect taxonomy, descriptive writing, surface strategy taxonom