Students’ grammatical errors in English speaking activities: A case study of third semester students of English Department of UIN Sunan Gunung Djati Bandung

Grammatical errors can happen when people speak. This research attempts to find out the grammatical errors experienced by students in speaking activities, and the reason why they experience such errors. Sixteen students of the third semester of English Department UIN Sunan Gunung Djati Bandung in academic year 2012 are involved as the participants. Qualitative case study employed as the research design, and audio recording and interview are used as the instruments to collect the data. Then, the theory of Linguistic category taxonomy by Politzer and Ramirez (quoted by Dulay, et al; 1982) and Adult learners in developing English speaking skills (Shumin, K; 2002) are adopted to analyze the data. The result of the research shows that there are 77 grammatical errors which consist of 33 morphological and 44 syntactical errors. Auxiliary verbs (13 errors or 16,9%) and noun (13 errors or 16,9%) are found to be the grammatical errors mostly experienced by the students, followed by infinitive (12 errors or 15,6%), determiner (9 errors or 11,7%) and subject-verb agreement (4 errors or 5,2%). Those errors happen because in Bahasa Indonesia the grammatical structures of times or tenses in expressing utterances are not available. The affective factor of developing speaking skill also becomes the possible causes for students to experience the grammatical errors. They, as adult learners, feel uneasy to memorize vocabularies and have a little awareness in using grammar