Institutional Repository | Satya Wacana Christian University: Common Errors in EFL Students' Writing on Facebook

Common Errors in EFL Students’ Writing on Facebook
Fransiska Retno Ambar Sari

Abstract

Social media has now been widely spread and used by many people around the
world, including students. The massive development of technology makes the use
of Computer Mediated Communication (CMC) as a media of learning language
has also improved. However, there is a need to conduct more studies on errors
that students committed in CMC. This study examines common errors some EFL
students made when writing sentences on Facebook. A case study methodology
was employed to analyze the causal relationship of the common errors. This study
found that students had the greatest problem in verb tense, followed by article,
pronoun, preposition, capitalization, sentence fragment, subject-verb agreement,
word order, and spelling. The other types of problems faced by the students were
punctuation, word choice, verb, singular/plural, word form, sentence structure,
interjection, and subject and verb omission. The result might imply that
interlingual or transfer error and intralingual error or developmental errors have
caused the errors. Apparently, students were influenced by their first language,
Bahasa Indonesia when writing on the target language, English.

Key words: writing, error analysis, interlingual error, Facebook, CMC, EFL learners