The Background of Study

I. INTRODUCTION

1.1. The Background of Study

Language is a systematic resource for expressing meaning in context. The function of language are to describe the experience, to exchange the experience, and to organize the experience are the most significant for the human life. As a means of communication, the people use language for the human aspect, using spoken language, written language or silent language. By using the language, we can talk to other people in the society, so does with writing is important in our life because it gives us the ability to record and communicate our experience and knowledge o others. It becomes an available source of information and ideas. Lindaman 1989 : 11 definition, “ writing is a process of communication that use graphic symbol in conventional system in order to convey message to a reader”. In conveying experience and knowledge is able to write down in written form. It can be proved that there are errors to raise up even in choosing comfortable words, grammar and so on which are related in writing. In learning English, there are four major skills. They are listening, speaking, reading, and writing. Writing is one of the skills which exposes facts, ideas by persuading, explaining or interpreting them in some clear, effective, and organized a way. Hartog 1986 : 24 said there are three aims of writing a to enable the thought, b to explore and elaborate these thought, c to develop their thinking to convey to other people the result of their thinking, d to convey to other people the result of their thinking as clearly and completely as possible. Descriptive paragraph is reproduces the way things, look, smell, taste, fell, or sound. There Universitas Sumatera Utara are many problems of students in writing descriptive paragraph. The writer will describe problem in writing descriptive paragraph. Vocabulary is very important in writing. Mastering vocabulary in writing. Mastering vocabulary in writing is important to develop the paragraph, and it also helps the people to support their idea to convey the idea of writing. People cannot arrange their words in sequence to be a good sentence. They often make errors in forming sentences, the grammar and structure of the sentence is very difficult for them. They only write a group words without using the grammar in English. This factors influence them in arranging the idea of paragraph, so that they get some difficulties in writing. The structural or grammatical in writing are two parts of English. Having realized the difficulties in learning English, so I decide to study grammatical errors in writing a descriptive paragraph. 1.2. The Objective of Study By writing this paper, I want to explain the objective of study, they are: 1. To find out the dominant errors in a descriptive writing. 2. To identify the cause of the errors of grammar in writing a descriptive paragraph. 1.3. The Scope of Study I am very concerned with grammatical errors in writing a descriptive paragraph. Since the grammatical errors are very often complex and complicated. The Scope of study is restricted to the errors of some parts of speech, namely: nouns, pronouns, verb, adverbs, adjectives and punctuations found in the Jakarta Post, on 1 Tuesday, 2 nd February 2009, page three, the second column; 2 Tuesday, 2 nd February, page three, the fourth column; 3 Thursday, 4 th Februay 2009, page three, the fifth column. Universitas Sumatera Utara 1.4. The Significance of Writing I hope that this paper would be significant because it can be very useful for everybody who reads this paper, especially for me and other English learners. Besides that, it gives contribution about English tenses in writing and to motivate them to study the learning materials effectively. 1.5. The Method of Writing In writing this paper, some books are collected as references from the library and some were bought at bookstores. By reading those books and collecting some information from the website hopefully this paper can be completed on time. Both of the methods were really helpful in providing me with some necessary information. Universitas Sumatera Utara CHAPTER II DESCRIPTION OF GRAMMATICAL ERRORS In comprehending a language people implicated to conform a system that relates sound to meaning. This has traditionally called the grammar of the language. Grammar is very crucial and takes an extremely important role in language learning. It deals with basic elements of language. Furgesson and Manser 1989 : 18 states that “ Grammar is the study how a language work”. It shows us the words of language are put together to make meaningful sentences. It also provides us with names for different types of word or phrase and task they perform in a sentence. Some people think that grammar must be related to Latin and Greek since they were the famous language in the past. English and Hopkins 1985 : 17 explain that : “The words grammar comes from the word graphein latin . Thus, grammar can define as the science of letters or writing. Then they say that grammar is all the rules of language usage. It classified word into all sorts of categories and describes the peculiarities of each category. To do so efficiently, grammar has us many categories as are required, and designates each category by a term which enables it to be recognized”. According grammar has an important and indispensable role in language learning. To understand the grammar is not as simple as by often means by the term “ structure “ in the English curriculum. Actually, grammar deals not only with syntax but also with phonology, morphology and semantic. Further, the distinction between grammar and structure is neither Universitas Sumatera Utara emphasized nor indicated. In this study, the term grammar an structure are employed interchangeably.

2.1 Description of Errors