Grammatical Errors in Students' Narrative Writing

ABSTRACT Astasari, Isani. 2009. Grammatical Errors in Students’ Narrative Writing. Thesis, English Department, Faculty of Letters, State University of Malang. Advisor: Dr. Nur Mukminatien, M.Pd. Key words: grammar, grammatical errors, narrative writing. This study is intended to find out and describe grammatical errors in students’ narrative writing. It was conducted at SMAN 1 Malang and took the eleventh graders of XI IPA 5 class as the subject because beside this class was taught by the researcher when she was having a practice teaching in SMAN 1 Malang, the classes in that school are parallelized so that the level of English mastery of each class is considered the same. This study employed descriptive qualitative approach and used a case study design as it investigated grammatical problems in one particular class. The data of this study are 85 of the students’ narrative writing on free topics. The grammatical errors found are classified based on the surface strategy taxonomy proposed by Dulay et al.(1982); they are errors of omission, errors of addition, errors of misformation and errors of misordering. This study reveals that there are 860 errors found from the data. The highest frequency of errors is omission errors (41.51%) that consist of: omission of verb inflection -ed/-d, omission of to be, omission of plural marker -s/’-es, omission of articles and definite article, omission of preposition, omission of possessive marker ‘s, and other omission errors, including omission of –ing, omission of auxiliary verb, and omission of pronoun. The second highest frequency of errors is error of misformation (35.5%) including misformation of past tense verb, misformation of verb, misformation of to be, misformation of preposition, misformation of articles, misformation of modal auxiliary, misformation of pronoun and misformation of noun. The next highest frequency is errors of addition (21.74%) that comprise of addition of verb inflection –ed/-d, addition of to be, addition of preposition, addition of plural marker –s/-es, addition of articles and definite article, addition of –ing, -ly, and addition of verb auxiliary. Misordering errors come as the lowest frequency of errors that only amount to 1.3%. Errors of misordering include misordering of adverb, misordering of to be, misordering of modal auxiliary, misordering of noun phrase and misordering of subject. Interlingual and intralingual interference are considered as the major causes of these errors. Based on the research findings, some suggestions are given to the English teachers and the students. The teachers are suggested to give the students more exposures to the English structure that are different from those in Bahasa Indonesia and to pay attention on particular structures that often create difficulties for the students. The students are advised to expose themselves to many sources in English and more exercises especially in English structures that are considered difficult