INTRODUCTION Thesis Christina 13020212410005 GRAMMATICAL ERROR ANALYSIS
2 vocabularies, reading, and not usually encouraged to speak the language. Students
then tend to passively learn the language – they answer the questions given in reading for example, or choose the correct answer provided, etceteras.
Communicating or producing a composition in English is hardly a skill taught during their English learning years in high schools. Thus generally students
consider it as difficult when asked to present their ideas in English. And when they do, it is not rare that the expressions they produce sound Indonesia as they
seem to merely translate word by word their ideas in English. Here is one example, “In Islam explained if a women wearing clothes, do not let that tight or
not forming part of the body.” Building a composition in English, therefore, is still the biggest challenge
faced by the students. This is not a thing they can produce in five or ten minutes. In fact, due to its complexity, it sometimes takes all of the efforts needed to make
a composition. Students are demanded to employ their grammatical as well as rhetorical devices. They are also asked to pay attention to several components.
Heaton mentioned that there are five main areas in writing including language use, mechanical skills such as punctuation, treatment of content, stylistic skills,
and judgment skills Heaton,1988:35. Therefore, writing is often a device to measure one’s ability in a language. That device is also employed in Faculty of
Language and Literature, UNSIQ, as in order to graduate, the students must write a research report in English.
The researcher notes that she often encounters complicated yet ungrammatical or even opaque sentences in her students’ writing, such as in the
3 following sample “UNSIQ take a new campus regulation that is wearing skirt for
women college students, hope UNSIQ will be a real university which can integrate the pearl of Islamic boarding school and modern education in dynamics
of culture, social and politic.” It is necessary to highlight the fact that the students have had English before.They graduated from high schools carrying the standard
competence covering fluent communicative one. They had been exposed to English for at least six years before they began their college years, though
obviously for most students, not actively. They have passed the national examination in which the questions given for English are those challenging their
understanding in the meaning of interpersonal as well as transactional texts, whether in formal or informal context, in the daily life context bsnp-
indonesia.org. This covers several genres including among other descriptive, recount, report, descriptive, narrative, exposition, and argumentative – each of
which has its own style. This study describes the errors students make in writing composition and
the possible reasons why those errors appear. There have been many similar studies such as one conducted by Megaiab 2013 entitled “The English Writing
Competence of the Students of Indonesian Senior High School.” He investigated the writing competence of two senior high school students in their first year by
analysing their sentences. He focused his study in SMA 1 and SMA 3 Semarang and had 140 students as the participants of the study. He performed a two-part
test, multiple choice questions to examine eight categories and paragraph writing. He found that the weakest area in writing is the grammatical aspect.This study is
4 different from the before-mentioned one in term of the population, which is
university students who have been taught English previously, and who are highly expected to be able to write good English composition – as it is one of the
requirements to graduate. This research also has direct impact to the site where the research is conducted, in which the result can be used to guide the following terms
material. It is quite often that the researcher gains information from the students that
they are not sure how to produce the correct forms of English because they feel that they both do not have adequate knowledge and lack of practice. This even
happens up to their final year when they are required to write a research composition. Therefore, the writer thinks that a kind of research to describe and
map the errors in their writing should be carried out in order to reveal what the real problems are, so that a better teaching in the field can be arranged in relation
to the area where the errors appear. At the moment, the faculty’s sole program is English Literature, but many of its students or graduates work as either part-time
English instructor or full-time English teachers at various tutoring institutions or formal schools in Wonosobo and its surrounding area. Thus, the researcher
considers it as something unfavorable to let the students make mistakes even if only, say, in the choice of the right word in the right context, if there are things
that can be done to help overcome it. They will teach their students similar incorrect form and therefore lengthen the chain of errors. Hopefully this study can
give a kind of guidance in order to reach a betterment in the quality of the graduates.
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1.2.Problem Statements
The problem statements of this research are: 1 What grammatical errors are there in the writing of English Department
students at Faculty of Language and Literature UNSIQ Wonosobo? 2 How are the distribution of the grammatical errors?
3 What are the causes of the grammatical errors in the writing of English Department students at Faculty of Language and Literature UNSIQ
Wonosobo?
1.3.Objectives of the Study
This research has several aims that hopefully are reached namely: 1 To describe the grammatical errors appear in the writing of the English
Department students at Faculty of Language and Literature UNSIQ Wonosobo.
2 To describe the distribution of the grammatical errors appear in the writing of the English Department students at Faculty of Language and Literature
UNSIQ Wonosobo. 3 To explore the causes of the grammatica; errors in English Department
students at Faculty of Language and Literature UNSIQ Wonosobo.
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1.4.Significances of the Study
The significances of this research can be stated as the followings: 1 This research gives description about the English Department students’
writing grammatical error at Faculty of Language and Literature Unsiq Wonosobo
2 This research comes in handy to give review of the potential grammatical error in writing in the faculty where the research is conducted.
3 This research is useful as a reference for other researchers conducting similar study.
1.5.Thesis Organization
To give brief review about what this thesis is about as well as to ease the readers to follow the discussion, here is the organization of this writing.
Chapter one is an Introduction. It consists of background of the study, statements of the problem, objectives of the study, significances of the study, and
writing organization. The next chapter is Review of the Literature. This chapter reviews the
previous studies conducted in writing competence analysis. It also elaborates the literature related to the topic, which is writing competence theories as well as
error analysis. Chapter three is Research Methods. This chapter is about the methods of
data collection and methods of data analysis used by the writer in conducting her research and composing her thesis. This part contains the description of research
7 especially the descriptive research, methods of data collection used in gathering
the data needed, and methods of data analysis used to perform the obtained result. Chapter four is the Findings and Discussion. This chapter presents the
finding of the research and the discusses the grammatical error in writing of the students of English Departmentat Faculty of Language and Literature,UNSIQ
Central Java in Wonosobo. Chapter five is Conclusion. This chapter contains summary of the main
points as well as the suggestion.