AN ANALYSIS OF UNIVERSITY STUDENTS’ ERRORS IN WRITING PARAGRAPHS

This thesis concerns on the analysis of university students’ errors in writing paragraph. In general, people think it is easy to write English sentences into paragraphs. Learners mostly do not pay attention to the aspects of paragraph writing, namely topic sentence, supporting sentences and concluding sentence. In this error analysis study, the first semester students of ELESP were involved as the sample of this study through purposive sampling technique since the students have experienced in the paragraph writing activities. Students’ writing document was used as the instrument in this study. Afterwards, the Miles and Huberman Model was used to analyze the data. The findings were expected to give beneficial impact for students in implemented appropriate strategy of writing paragraph. The writing paragraph followed the eleven aspects of writing such as articles, prepositions, subject verb agreement, word order, verb tense, plural and singular, capitalization, spelling, fragment, demonstration, and irregular verbs. The results of the data analysis showed that the students had many errors in the paragraph writing because the students did not pay attention about eleven of the writing aspects and some students did not understand mean of the sentences. The students must learn more the aspects of writing paragraph and the teacher must give the students better lesson about writing paragraph. Keywords: English writing skills, paragraph writing, sentences, writing aspects,writing error