An Error Analysis of the Narrative Written Texts of the First Year Students of SMA Negeri 1 Yogyakarta in the Academic Year of 2012/2013.

This research study aims at (1) describing the kinds of errors made by the first year students of SMA Negeri 1 Yogyakarta in writing narrative texts and (2) describing the the causal factors of errors made by the first year students of SMA Negeri 1 Yogyakarta in writing narrative texts. The study was a case study which used a qualitative approach. The data were obtained from 32 students’ written texts and in-depth interviews. The data were analyzed using two techniques, namely the quantitative descriptive technique and qualitative descriptive technique. The quantitative descriptive technique consisted of four steps: identification, classification and localization, counting, and description. The results are as follows. (1) four categories of errors were found in the students’ written texts, consisting of omission, addition, selection, and misordering. (a) there are seven kinds of omission errors in the form of plural forms, omission of to be, omission of articles, omission of prepositions, omission of words, omission of auxiliary verbs, and omission of apostrophe as possessive noun markers; (b) three kinds of addition errors in the form of regularization, redundancy and simple addition; (c) six kinds of selection errors in the form of misselection of word, misselection of word form, misselection of preposition, misselection of article, incorrect use of verb form, and the last is incorrect use of to be; (d) 18 errors in the form of misordering errors. Furthermore, from 396 errors found, 2 errors were global errors. (2) selection errors occur most frequently (52.7%) followed by omission errors (25. 2%), addition errors (17. 9%), and misordering errors (4. 0%). (3) two kinds of direct factors caused the students to make errors in their writing, namely; (a) negative interlanguage transfers in the forms of copulative verb interference, adverb interference, preposition interference, article interference, word-order interference, and tense form interference; (b) negative intralingual transfer in the forms of misanalysis, incomplete rule application, ignorance rule restriction, and overgeneralization. (4) the three sources of indirect factors causing the students to make errors in their writing are: students’ low interest, feedback on the students’ writing results, and low frequency of the writing instruction