An Error Analysis on Narrative Writing of the Eighth Year Students of Junior High School; A Case Study of the Eighth Year Students at Dharma Pertiwi junior High School Depok

The objective of this study is to describe the real condition about students� errors in narrative writing at eighth year students of Dharma Pertiwi Junior High School Depok. Based on the goal the writer intends to answer these questions; �What kinds of error do the students of Dharma Pertiwi Junior High School make in writing narrative text? And what causes of error did the students make in writing narrative text?� In this study the writer uses qualitative narrative research. Meanwhile, the data research is derived from a writing test. The writer analyzes the students� English writing to find out the kind of error and the causes that the students made. The respondent of this research is 45 eighth year students of Dharma Pertiwi Junior High School Depok. The writer took randomly 20 of 45 students to fulfill the research. The research finding states that the most common error which most students made is misinformation, that is 97 times or 50.0% of all the errors made. Interlingual transfer in misinformation occurred when the students chose wrong forms of the verbs, these errors commonly occur in cases of subject-verb agreement. Then, the second common error is omission with 58 times making up 30.0% of the total errors. This error occurred mainly in tense markers or number markers such as the omission of the grammatical morphemes, for example, the omissions of the -ed marker in the simple past tense verbs. Interlingual transfer is cause of errors as the students� transfer of what they have known about the language system in the first language to be transformed into the target language. The third error is 33 or 18.0% errors of misordering. In this case, many students had errors of putting the words in an utterance in the wrong order. Interlingual transfer in misordering occurred when the students sequenced correct elements wrongly. And, the last is 4 or 2.0% errors from the addition. The students are often doing such an error because they are interfered by their mother tongue. In conclusion, the reasons why the eighth year students of Dharma Pertiwi Junior High School Depok made errors are because of their mother tongue interference and their Indonesian logical thinking