Grammatical Errors Made by the Eighth Graders of SMP N 9 Malang in Writing a Descriptive Text.

ABSTRAK Adescriptive text is a kind of text that is used to describe a place, a person, and animal . Similarly, a descriptive writing is a writing activity that also describes a thing or someone.The writing skill is considered as the most difficult skill to learn compared to other skills.Then the researcher used the descriptive text as a material in this study. It consists of some of linguistic competences. One of them is a grammar which is important to be used in writing the decriptive text.Therefore, this study was carried out to analyze and to classify the types and the source of students’ grammatical errors in writing a descriptive paragraph. The method used a descriptive quantitative thatwas applied in this research. Moreover, the subject of this study was second year students at SMP N 9 Malang. The researcher took 30 students as the samples. The errors collected were classified based on the corder’s theory (1981)and the data were collected through a test of writing descriptive text in the form of a paragraph.Finally, an error analysis was used. Thefindings showed that (1) there was a total of 184 errors with 106 omission errors or 57.61%, 19 addition errors or10.33%, 44 misformation errors 23.91%, and 15 misordering error 8.15%.The first, omission of s/es singular person 34 errors or 32.08% was the highest error among other omission errors. They were alsoomission of article 31.13%,omission of be 18.88%, omission of plural markers 6.6%, omission of suffix ing 6.6%, omission of preposition 3.77%, and omission of noun 0.94%. The secondtype of error was misformation error that consisted ofarchi forms77.27%, alternating forms13.64%, regularization9.09%. The third error was addition errors that composed of simple addition 47.36% and double marking57.9%. The researcher did not find any regularization of this type. The last type of error was misordering contained misordering of adjective that took errors 60%, misordering of subject/object pronoun 33.33%, and misordering of adverb 6.67%. (2) the sources of errors were because the students’ the interference 14.13 %, overgeneralization15.22%,ignorance the rule restriction 15.22%,the false concepts hypothesized14.13% and many of them did not complete their sentences41.3% or incomplete application of rules. Finally, it can be concluded that the use of grammar is important in writing skill. It is suggested that education should pay more attention on the role of Grammar especially for the teachers. They need to explain further the use of the present tense, the use of preposition, article, sentence arrangement, and also the structure of English. Future researcherscan also use the result of this research as the base to conduct another research in different level of students related to this issue