The past perfect progressive emphasizes the duration of an activity that was in progress before another activity or time in the past. For example:
The police had been looking for the criminal for two years before they
caught him.
Jun had finally arrived at six o‟clock. I had been waiting for him since four-thirty.
This tense also may express an activity in progress close in time to another activity or time in the past. For example:
When Jun got home, his clothes was still wet because he had been
running in the rain.
I went to Jun‟s house after the funeral. My eyes were red because I had been crying.
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G. Previous Studies
This study of error analysis had been done before and is still done until now to find information from students errors. Al Badawi from King Khalid University
was once conducted an error analysis study in phonetics Morphological and syntactical error. Using BA students of King Khalid University students as the
sample of the research, this study confirms El Hibir and El Thaha finding in 1995 about the use of b to replace p. In a thesis written by Saara Sirkka Mungungu in
2010 about error analysis in Namibian learners’ writing which is an ongoing research to find out the teaching and learning process.
In 2013 Rini Meliyanti from the State Islamic University conducted a reseach in students descriptive writing using Betty Azar classification and resulted with
word choice errors domination over students writing.
31
Ibid., p. 47.
Subject + had + been + Verb-ing + Object
26
CHAPTER III RESEARCH METHODOLOGY
1. Place and Time of the Study
The writer conducted the research at SMP Mutiara Harapan which is located at Jl. Pondok Kacang Raya No. 2, Tangerang Selatan. The research
started at 27
th
of March 2014 and ended at 25
th
of August 2014.
2. The Method of the Study
The method used in this study is descriptive qualitative method. The writer conducted the research using some steps of procedure. It was started by giving a
test paper to the students; the paper contained questions that guide students’
writing content. After the writing finished the data was collected. The writings were then checked, to find the faulty grammar. The papers were then given back
to the students, and the writer asked them to find the mistakes they made and write their correction. This way the errors and mistakes were separated. The errors
were then classified into several categories based on the similarities they had. The classification used was Betty Azar
’s error classification that classified the errors into 14 types of errors in a detail grammar classification. The result of all those
steps was stored and analyzed to find the source of the errors. Last, the writer interpreted the result and concluded the research.
3. Population and Sampling
The total population of the Second year students of academic year 20142015 at SMP Mutiara Harapan was 48 students, divided into three classes.
The writer used purposive sampling technique and took 31 students of grade 8-1 and 8-2 as the sample of this research.
