Errors of passive voice construction found in the explanation composition of english department students

Since writing is one of four important skills that must be mastered by the students in English Department, a course called Writing is provided for the students in order to present the basic concepts of various gemes of text and let them pour their perspectives out into a piece of writing (Widiati, 2011:60). However, the process of writing itself is not easy so errors easily appear. The writer does an analysis on what kinds of errors of passive voice construction and why those errors are found in the explanation composition of English Department students. The analysis relies on the theory of contrastive analysis and error analysis. As the instrument, the writer and the questionnaire play an important role in this study. The study reveals that there are three types of errors found in the explanation compositions according to surface strategy taxonomy which are errors of rnisforrnation, errors of omission, and errors of rnisordering and two types of errors according to linguistic category taxonomy which are errors with formation of passive sentences and inappropriate use of passives. Specifically, there are three kinds of misformation errors which are misformation of auxiliary, misformation of infinitive verb, and misformation of past participle, there are three kinds of omission errors which are omission of auxiliary, omission of pronoun, omission of preposition, and one kind of misordering errors which is misordering of the elements of passive voice. Then, problems dealing with formation of passive sentences have three types which are misformation of passive verb, active order but passive form, and absence of preposition while inappropriate use of passive has two types which are intransitive verb passives and misuse of passives in complex sentences. Besides, there are major sources which emerge the errors. They are interlingual transfer and intralingual transfer. Supported by the questionnaire, there are four main difficulties when the students construct passive voice. They are use of passive, grammar rule, word order, and use of irregular and regular verbs