Background of the Study

1 CHAPTER I INTRODUCTION

A. Background of the Study

In this era of globalization, it is important to learn the English language. As applicable at Muhammadiyah University of Surakarta, English is a compulsory subject that must be studied by the students of all faculties. However, not all students get a thorough knowledge of the English language. For that reason, LPIDB has created a new program, namely English Tutorial Program ETP. English Tutorial Program is designed for all students of non-English department especially to add the knowledge of the English language in verbal and written form. Students are acquiring a basic knowledge of English such as a simple conversation, grammar, tenses and so forth. ETP is given to students in the first and second semester every Saturday and accompanied by a tutor that has been trained. ETP is happily studied by all students of non-English department one of them is students of Accounting Education. Each week the students will be given different materials in the learning process. The materials include past experience, describing something, giving direction and others. As one of the materials is past experience, the tutor gives the task to write a recount text for students about their own past experiences. The recount text is written to retell past event with the purpose of informing or entertaining the audience or both E.g. I was in Jakarta last week. In the recount text, the construction is using past tense because recount text retells the past event. English involves four kinds of language skills, namely reading, listening, speaking, and writing. One of them is writing skills, writing is one of the basic skills of the English language to learning English. According to Tiwari 2005: 120, writing is a complex process for writers to explore their own thoughts and ideas and make them visible and concrete. The main purpose of the learners’ writing activity is to catch grammar, spelling, and punctuation errors Leki in Fauziati, 2010: 46. Writing involves more basic skills than perhaps any other, good writing skills allowed you to communicate your message with clarity. Essentially, writing needs good knowledge and hard thinking when the students produce words, sentences, and a paragraph at the same time with good English grammar. English is known as a foreign language which is rarely primarily used by the general public. In Indonesia, a learner usually has more difficulty in learning a foreign language, because of the English grammar is more complicated than Indonesian grammar. Making errors are a common problem for the non-English students at UMS, and they usually make errors when writing. For non-English department students, English is a difficult subject for them. Actually, in practicing writing English most of the students are still making mistakes in grammar, structure, vocabulary, and a mechanism consisting of a preposition and spelling. The differences between Indonesian language and English language make students confused when they write the sentences in English. Error analysis is a branch of applied linguistics. Error is a part of learning. James in Fauziati 2016: 105 indicated that an errors express the teacher what needs to be taught, express the researcher how learning process, and its means whereby learners test their hypotheses about the second language”. It means that the learners have something developing in their learning process to achieve the target goal. The Error is different from mistakes, errors arise only when there was no intention to omit one, but a mistake is a fault made by a learner where the learner is able for correcting a fault and is not intended, it is then called mistakes James, 1998. Based on the purpose of analysis, errors are usually classified according to the language component which include morphological, syntactical, and discourse error Fauziati, 2016. So, the researcher categorizes the errors made by students based on the language. Error analysis in recount text is very necessary. There are some benefits of error analysis in writing recount text. First, the writer can help teachers to find the dominant error written by students. Second, the writer can help students to solve their problems in learning the second language, especially in writing recount text. All of the teachers have purposed to make the students understand the texts, and to improve their skill in writing and to make students write sentences correctly. The researcher gets data from Accounting Education students in English Tutorial Program ETP at Muhammadiyah University of Surakarta. The following sentences are the examples of errors written by Accounting Education students: “There I swiming with father and brother” is categorized into morphological error. The word “swimming” has misordering of spellings because the word “swimming” is very influence the content of the sentence. The correct word is “swimming”. The error happens in the morphological aspect. An analysis of the sentence is wrong used of the article is categories into syntactical error; “before home we took [ ] time to eat first” should be written “Before home we took a time to eat first”. In the sentence, it is finding the type of error called omission. The other error happens on the sentence “The view [ ] very beautiful”. The sentence should be written “The view was very beautiful”. The error has omitted was as the predicate of the sentence. It has influenced the content of the sentence and wrong on the grammatical. After the current study categorizes the error based on the language component, the next discussion is remedial teaching. The most important in the remedial teaching is helping the learners’ have more better progress in writing recount text and they do not make errors again in the other times. Most of students still make the errors, or they do not understand the elements of writing recount text. Based on the phenomena above, the current study was interested to take the title “AN ERROR ANALYSIS ON RECOUNT TEXT WRITTEN BY STUDENTS OF ACCOUNTING EDUCATION: A CASE STUDY ON ENGLISH TUTORIAL PROGRAM ETP AT MUHAMMADIYAH UNIVERSITY OF SURAKARTA”.

B. The scope of the Study