Grammatical Errors Made by the Freshmen of the English Department of State University of Malang in Paragraph Writing

ABSTRACT Rahayu, Aninda Dwi. 2015. Grammatical Errors Made by the Freshmen of the English Department of State University of Malang in Paragraph Writing. Undergraduate Thesis, English Department, Faculty of Letters, State University of Malang. Advisors: Dr. Suharyadi, S.Pd., M.Pd and Dr. Johannes A. Prayogo, M.Pd., M.Ed. Key Words: Grammatical Errors, Freshmen, Writing. Freshmen of the English Department of State University of Malang get a compulsory program in the first semester named Intensive Course (IC). It is programmed to provide the freshmen with a receptive and productive skill for using English in communication. The general objective of this program is to develop the English communicative ability of the freshmen. In the first semester, the freshmen are taught Basic English for nine meetings in a week in order to improve their grammatical competence. As the freshmen are supplied with adequate grammar competence, they are supposed to make fewer grammatical errors in their writings. However, the freshmen of academic year 2014/2015 still made numerous grammatical errors in their writings. Reflecting upon that problem, the researcher needs to find the types of errors, the most frequent errors in their writing, and the reasons why they still made the errors. The design used in this study is descriptive qualitative. There were 30 students chosen randomly and involved in this study. 10 (ten) students were taken from English Language Teaching program and 20 (twenty) students were taken from English Language and Literature program. The data were obtained by collecting their portfolio from the lecturers who taught Intensive Course Writing. The theme of the essay writing was “Writing Your Opinion”. The students were also interviewed concerning why they made errors in their writing. Thereafter, the data were analyzed by using Surface Strategy Taxonomy by Dulay et al. (1982) in the book Language Two. The results of this study are: (1) there are four kinds of errors in students’ writing; they are Omission, Addition, Misformation, and Misordering; (2) from totally 174 errors found in data, the most frequent error was errors of omission that reached 43.1 %, the next was the errors of addition that reached 34%, the third was the errors of misformation with 18.4%, the last and the most infrequent error was errors of misordering with 4.5%; (3) based on the interview’s result, the reason why freshmen made errors in their writing was the lack of knowledge in understanding about grammar rules. The other factors were forgetting the grammar rules, not really paying attention on the Grammar rules, worrying out of running of time, and being in a tired condition also influenced the freshmen to make errors. It can be concluded that (a) there are four types of errors, those are omission, addition, misformation and misordering, (b) the most frequent error was omission errors, (c) the reason why they made errors was because of the lack of understanding of grammar rules. The lecturers of Intensive Course program are suggested that they improve the teaching about grammar. It could be done by discussing with the freshmen on how to identify the errors and what the possible cause of committing errors. That would bring about a greater understanding about grammar rules. For the future researchers, it is suggested that they use the findings as a reference or guidance for their research