An analysis on the second grade students' grammatical errors in writing at SMP YMJ South Tangerang

This study carried out to analyze and to classify the types of students? grammatical errors in writing. The errors collected are classified based on the Surface Taxonomy Strategy. Besides, the purpose of this study were to find out their frequency of occurrence and to find out the cause of errors which students made in writing narrtaive paragraph. The method used in this study was descriptive. The descriptive design applied in this stud was case study. Furthermore, the respondent of this study were the second grade students of SMP YMJ South Tangerang which consist of 30 students but it was only take 19 students as the respondent. Furthermore, the data were collected through test. Grammatical errors got the result on six areas, namely; tense, subject verb, word choice, spelling, capitalization, and noun phrase. The purpose of this study was to know the highest frequency of students? grammatical errors based on Azar?s theory. The highest frequency was tense; it was 56.48% or 61 errors that students made in writing narrative. The results of the error analysis process showed that students commit errors into four types: omission, addition, misformation/misselction and misorder. From the highest frequency was misformation was the errors which most frequently produced by the students. It took 62.04% of the total of errors. The last was causes of errors; intralingual transfer got 89 errors or 82.40% from the causes of errors that the writer found in students? writing. These errors were conducted because most students generalize the rule and apply it incompletely. Besides, errors occured because of students? fault in understanding the concept of hypothesis. To sum up, it showed that writing a paragraph was difficult for student