Error analysis on the use of simple past tense in a recount text made by the eighth grade students of Saint Joseph Junior High School Surabaya.

English has a great influence on all aspects of human life, expecially for students nowadays. The importance of English is due to the fact that communication in English becomes a necessity. Teaching English for the junior school level students is expected to help them in expressing their ideas and feelings verbally with correct grammar. Students’ rich past experiences remain memorable, and students are encouraged to express them. Simple past tense is one part of grammar, which expresses something that happenned in the past. Past verbs are divided into two kinds: regular and irregular. A regular verb is a verb which has a normal inflection –d or –ed. An irregular verb is a verb which does not have a normal inflection of –d or –ed to the infinitive form. Based on the reality, the writer is interested in researching and learning more about the students’errors in the use of simple past tense in a recount text by the eighth grade students of Saint Joseph Junior High School, Surabaya of the academic year 2013/2014. The writer conducted this thesis by using a descriptive-qualitative method. The instrument used was concerning the grammar test in a recount text in the form of controlled composition. The writer applied only one test administration. The test consists of thirty (30) items for three classes; class 8A=36 students, class 8C= 37 students, class 8E = 35 students. Class 8C was used as the try out group. The writer got the result that the test was reliable. Therefore, class 8A and 8E with a total 76 students were taken as sample of the study. The result of the study shows that the total errors made by the students were 720 errors; Misformation errors (71.14%), omission errors (15.28%), and addition errors (13.05%). Those errors made by the students were due to two possible causes: (1) Interlanguage which is the interference of the mother tongue, the Indonesian language, and (2) Intralingual factors which were overgeneralization, ignorance of rules restriction, incomplete application of rules, and false concept hypothesized. Concerning that the students still committed many errors on the use of simple past tense in the process of learning the target language, the teacher is expected not only to be a motivator, but also to be a coach to work together to find the best solution in overcoming the students’ difficulties. The great success of the target language teaching is getting students of Saint Joseph Junior High School Surabaya to deal with their habits or to minimize them in committing errors as the influence of their mother tongue. It should be better to give them more exercises in using the simple past tense both in spoken and written language