Syntactical errors analysis on students’ graduating papers of English Department of UIN Bandung

This research departs from the finding of problem in students’ graduating papers. The problems are the syntactical errors made in English writing by using foreign language. The errors can be caused by the psychological problem due to native language problem. It is because the writings are not made by their mother tongue but they use English in their writings, so that it becomes the challenge for them to write correctly by using English as foreign language. Errors are defined as any deviation from a selected norm of language performance, no matter what the characteristic or causes of the deviation might be. This research concerns with the syntactical errors found in the students’ graduating papers. This research is formulated into two research questions: What types of syntactical errors found in students’ graduating papers of English Department of UIN Bandung, and what are the dominant types of syntactical errors found in students’ graduating papers of English Department of UIN Bandung. The objectives of this study are to answer two research questions. They are to find out the type of syntactical errors and the predominant type found in the graduating papers. The method used in this research is descriptive and qualitative research in which the data are taken from ten graduating papers in English department of Adab and Humanities Faculty. The data are collected and analyzed using linguistic category taxonomy proposed by Dulay. Then, the errors found are classified into syntactic errors based on Politzer and Romirez’ model as a guideline. Then in analyzing the data, the researcher uses four steps. The data that have been obtained are identified, categorized, interpreted, and tabulated in order to get the result based on two research questions that are obtained in English writings. Based on two research questions, the result of this study shows that the researcher finds the types of syntactical errors in the graduating papers. the types found by the researcher are noun phrase, verb phrase, verb and verb construction, word order, and some transformation, besides that the dominant type found is the type of noun phrase. Finally the researcher proposes the suggestion for the next researchers to make the research based on the ability and anxiety in English knowledge. If they prefer to morphology field, they had better use it to analyze the object of the research then they should choose the interesting object for being analyzed in order to make a research easier and even to get a good result of the research