1. Data Analysis
After presenting the error into types of error which are written by Azar and explaining the frequency of error on each item in the previous pages, the writer
would like to talk more about the errors that get high frequency in the students‟ writing descriptive paragraph and of course their causes.
a.
Word Choice
The most errors that students made in writing descriptive paragraph is word choice. Word choice or diction is choosing the right word in a sentence.
Sometimes one word has the same meaning but has different usage in the sentence. Students had some difficulties in using appropriate words in their
sentences because not all words can be used in every sentence. For instance of this error is:
Student 14: “I school at MTsN SA Balaraja.” The correct one is “I study at MTsN SA
Balaraja.” This error happens because of overgenerealization intralingual transfer. They overgeneralized the meaning of word “school” and used it in
wrong place. Students also still confuse to choose the right word in a sentence because of the lack of knowledge or poor vocabularies and its use. Another
problem faced by students in term is some students did not know how to translate some appropriate words from Indonesian language to English.
The total of students‟ errors in word choice is 123, and then the grand total of errors occured is 588. The data can be percentage by the formula as follow:
P = × 100 P = × 100 = 20.9
b. Omission
Second rate type of error is omission. Omission errors are characterized by absence of an item that must appear in a well-formed utterence. Omission can
occur morphology. Learner often omit the third person singular morpheme –s, the
progressive –ing, the plural marker –s and the past tense inflection –ed or they
forgot to put the subject or predicate in a sentence. The example of this error is:
Student 4: “My school big.” This sentence absolutely wrong. It should be “My school is
big”. They made this error because they are still interfered by their mother tongue.
In another word, we could say that students were still influenced by their Indonesian language when they write English paragraph. The errors also
happened due to negative intralingual transfer or overgeneralization. Other example of this case is:
Student 2: “She serve the students if there is student want borrow book.” A verb must
agree with its subject in number singular or plural and in person first, second, and third. When subject and verb are correctly matched, it can be said that they
are grammatically agree. So, this sentence should be “She serves”. The students overgeneralized the rules of subject verb agreement.
Total of students‟ errors in omission is 68, and then the grand total of errors occured is 588. The data can be percentage by the formula as follow:
P = × 100 P = × 100 = 11.6
c. Punctuation
Punctuation is the practice or system of inserting various marks in written
text in order to aid interpretation. Here are following of the punctuation marks; Apostrophe [„], Quotation marks [“], Comma [,], Colon [:], Semicolon [;], Dash [-
],Parentheses , and Hypen [-]. Some students made errors in punctuation. Example of error in punctuation is:
Student 6: “In the library. I read and borrow a book.” It should be “In the library, I read and
borrow a book.” Another example of errors in punctuation is:
Student 12:
“This is my school, my school’s name is MTS SA BALARAJA, my school is very large and clean.” The correct sentense is “This is my school. My school name is
MTs SA Balaraja. My school is large and clean.” In this sentence the student put
the wrong punctuation. In this punctuation case, the students made errors because