Structure and written expression error analysis on TOEFL test students of english department Padangsidimpuan state institute for Islamic studies

The problem of this research came from students’ errors in answering inverted subject-verb item, adjective clause item, and noun clause item in TOEFL test. The errors found in their in their answer sheets could be analyzed, so that it rose a study of error analysis. By the error analysis, it could describe the analyzed errors clearly. Those errors became something important for the students to study, even if it became a further study. The objectives of this research are to identify and to analyze the errors found in inverted subject-verb item, adjective clause item, and noun clause item in structure and written expression section of TOEFL test 3 and test 4, and to find the dominant errors of each analyzed item in TOEFL test 3 and test 4. This was a library research which used document analysis method. The participants of this research were 9 students of English departments. The data were collected from students’ documents of question sheets and answer sheets in TOEFL test 3 and test 4. Analysis of the data consisted of 5 steps; they are data managing, reading/memoing, description, classifying, and interpreting. This research used member checking to check data trustworthiness. Based on the result of the research, there were 22 errors found in test 3 and 26 errors found in test 4. In the test 3, all 22 errors were classified into error of addition with the detail as follows; 8 errors in inverted subject-verb, 2 errors in adjective clause, and 12 errors in noun clause. In the test 4, 26 errors were classified into different kinds of error. 7 errors found in inverted subject-verb; 1 error of addition and 6 errors of misordering. 6 errors found in adjective clause; 5 errors of omission and 1 error of misformation. 5 errors found in noun clause number 9; 3 errors of addition and 2 errors of misformation. 8 errors found in noun clause number 11; 7 errors of omission and 1 error of misorderin