Word order errors by grade 12 students of SMA Seminari St. Yudas Thadeus Langgur in constructing English sentences

It is not easy to make good writing using four types of sentences and four sentence patterns. Some students often find some difficulties in composing or organizing good sentences. Some may face difficulties in some language components, especially in syntax, in ordering words of phrases and sentences. Those difficulties that are faced by students can lead them to make mistakes or errors. However, making errors is natural in learning process. Errors are significant because of these three aspects: they tell the teacher what needs to be taught, they tell the researcher how learning proceeds, and they are means whereby learners test their hypotheses about the second language. The purpose of this study is to investigate kinds of errors that are made by students and describe students’ word order errors in constructing English sentences that causes by syntactic transfer and interference. This study uses descriptive analysis as the method. The subjects of this study are 30 students of grade 12 of SMA Seminari St. Yudas Thadeus Langgur in academic year 2018/2019. The collected data is natural. The students are asked to write recount text in their own word and sentences. Students committed some kinds of errors in constructing English sentences in their recount text. They are grammar (omission and addition), spelling, capitalization, punctuation, and word order. In word order students committed errors because of syntactic transfer and interference of their mother tongue or first language. They commit 88 percent error sentences of their 373 sentences. Total error sentences are 330 sentences. They committed errors in word order as in total number 205 or 55 percent of the total number of sentences. Error sentences in syntactic interference are 95 sentences or 46 percent. Then, error sentences in syntactic transfer are 110 sentences or 54 percent. The subjects who commit error sentences are 100 percent of the total subjects. For word order errors in syntactic interference are 28 subjects or 93 percent of the total subjects. The students committed word order errors in syntactic transfer are 29 subjects or 97 percent of the total subjects. Thus, more students commit errors in syntactic transfer than in syntactic interference