Errors made by grade 9 students of SMPK Cita Hati, Surabaya, in constructing sentences by using restrictive adjective clauses

This study is error analysis on the errors made by grade 9 students of SMP Cita Hati, Surabaya, in constructing sentences by using restrictive adjective clauses. This study would like to know the types of errors the students made in constructing sentences by using restrictive adjective clause and the sources of the errors. This study was based on Larry Selinker’s theory about interlanguage. Interlanguage is a language which is produced by L2 learners while learning L2. Interlanguage can’t be considered as L2 because its structures are different from L2 grammatical structures. The subjects of this study are the grade 9 students of SMP Cita Hati, Surabaya. In order to collect the students’ errors in constructing sentences by using restrictive adjective clauses, the writer used a test that ask the students to construct sentences by using restrictive adjective clauses as the instrument of this study. The test, then, was administered to the students. From the data collected, the writer examined the data then classified the errors found into 6 types of errors. They were errors of relative pronouns (11.78% of total answers), errors of subjects (0.7% of total answers), errors of objects (3.57% of total answers), errors of word order (3.1% of total answers), errors of prepositions (1.55% of total answers) and miscellaneous errors of adjective clauses (12.13% of total answers). The total errors were 276 errors of 840 answers or 32.83% of total answers. After conducting error classification, the writer predicted some possible sources of errors proposed by Larry Selinker. The writer predicted the sources based on his observation toward the teacher who was teaching restrictive adjective clauses and the students. The possible sources of errors which were predicted as the causes of the students’ errors were language transfer, transfer of training and strategy of second language learning. After predicting some possible sources of the errors, the writer suggested some ways to help the students to learn grammar especially about restrictive adjective clauses