An error analysis of students’ descriptive writing at Khadijah Islamic boarding school

The purposes of this research are to find out the types of grammatical errors in students’ descriptive writing and to find out the most frequent type of errors in students’ descriptive writing. The method of this research is a descriptive qualitative method. The data were collected from 22 descriptive writings which were written by the students. The researcher used the writings as the instrument. In this research, all types of grammatical errors were classified and described based on surface strategy taxonomy by Dulay Burt, and Krashen (1982). Based on the result of the analysis, there were 670 grammatical errors found in the students’ descriptive writing. Misformation error occupies the first rank with 286 errors. Then following closely is omission error with 260 errors, next is addition error with 90 errors, and the last one is misorder error with 34 errors.Keywords: Error Analysis, Surface Strategy Taxonomy, Writing, Second Language.