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4. Tenth Grade Students of SMA GAMA Yogyakarta
The tenth grade students of SMA GAMA Yogyakarta are the subject of this study. The tenth grade
of SMA GAMA Yogyakarta is divided into two majors. Those are XA and XB. There are 44 students of SMA GAMA Yogyakarta
tenth grade, 21 students of XA and 23 students of XB.
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CHAPTER II REVIEW OF RELATED LITERATURE
This chapter provides some supporting theories of this study. It comprises two parts, theoretical description and theoretical framework.
A. Theoretical Description
This part describes the theories of errors, writing, descriptive texts, curriculum, and the theories of causing errors.
1. Theory of Errors
English is a language that has to be learnt by Senior High School students since it has become one of the compulsory subjects in national examination.
Hendrickson 1981 notes that making error is like an analogy as the children produce numerous errors while acquiring their first language p. 3. The similar
thing happened to the students of Senior High School in Indonesia, especially in SMA GAMA Yogyakarta. They are still learning to master the target language,
English. As the result of this, students of Senior High School produce a plenty of errors during the time of learning. It is also strengthtened by Dulay, Burt, and
Krashen 1982. Dulay et al. 1982 agree that people certainly make errors in studying language p. 138.
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2. Types of Errors
There are four major types of errors explained by Dulay et al 1982. Those are linguistic category taxonomy, surface strategy taxonomy, comparative
taxonomy, and communicative effect taxonomy. According to Dulay et al. 1982, linguistic category taxonomy deals with classifying errors according to either or
both language components or the particular linguistic constituent p. 146. Surface strategy taxonomy deals with the ways surface structures are changed.
Comparative taxonomy deals with the classification of errors based on the comparison between the structure of second language errors and certain other
types of construction. The last one, communicative effect taxonomy deals with errors from the perspective of their effect on the listener or reader.
In this study the researcher will focus on errors based on surface strategy taxonomy. As Dulay et al. 1982 declare that identifying errors from surface
strategy taxonomy gives great promises for the researcher to know the students cognitive processes in constructing new language p. 150.
Ellis 1997 provides types of errors such as omission, misformation, and misordering p. 18. In the same page, errors types theory of Dulay et al. 1982 is
similar to Ellis’ 1997. Dulay et al. 1982 put their types of errors into surface strategy taxonomy. Those types of errors are presented as follows.
a. Omission
Dulay et al. 1982 state that omission happens because of the absence of an item that must appear in a well-formed utterance. Some morphemes are