Comparative Taxonomy Theoretical Description

Study Program of Sanata Dharma University in Structure IV. Structure IV here is one of the compulsory subjects that must be taken by the fourth semester students. Reported speech studied in this paper was limited in the written form which the students converted it from direct speech. In this study, there are three problems regarding the fourth semester students’ mastery and errors of reported speech. This study used a test to collect the information and also to answer those three problems. To answer the first problem, which was to figure out how far the fourth semester students have mastered reported speech, this study performed necessary statistical computation. Later, the result of the computation was compared to the standard of mastery stated in the academic regulation of Sanata Dharma University. The students’ mastery on reported speech was found out from their scores in the test. These scores were then compared to the minimum standard of mastery stated in the academic regulation of Sanata Dharma University. If their achievement in reported speech is low according to that academic regulation, it means that they still have difficulties in mastering reported speech. If their achievement is high, then it can be said that they have mastered reported speech. Concerning the second problem, which was to figure out the types of errors that students made in reported speech, this study used the students’ answers to analyse what types of errors they made. The analysis of students’ errors was based on 1 the types of errors proposed by Dulay et al., 2 the grammatical changes of reported speech, and 3 the types of reported speech. For answering the third problem of this study, which was to figure out what possible causes of students’ errors in reported speech were, this study used the 30 PLAGIAT MERUPAKAN TINDAKAN TIDAK TERPUJI Brown’s theory of sources of errors. From the errors the students made, it was analysed whether errors were caused by interference of the students’ native language interlingual transfer, by the target language itself intralingual transfer, or by the context of learning. 31 PLAGIAT MERUPAKAN TINDAKAN TIDAK TERPUJI