An Analysis of Tenth Grade Students’ Grammatical Error in Writing Recount Text
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ISSN: 2302-920X
Jurnal Humanis, Fakultas Ilmu Budaya Unud
Vol 21.1 Nopember 2017: 135-138
An Analysis of Tenth Grade Students’ Grammatical Error in Writing Recount Text
Putu Ayu Yuni Yudari
English Departement Faculty of Arts – Udayana University [[email protected]]
Abstrak
Artikel ini berjudul “ An Analysis of Tenth Grade Students’ Grammatical Error in Writing Recount Text” yang bertujuan untuk menemukan tipe dari kesalahan gramatikal dan menganalisis penyebab terjadinya kesalahan gramatikal yang dibuat oleh siswa. Data penelitian ini diperoleh dari tulisan biografi singkat yang dibuat oleh siswa dari SMA Negeri 2 Amlapura dan SMA PGRI 1 Amlapura. Penelitian ini merupakan penelitian deskriptif kualitatif. Dari penelitian ini ditemukan empat tipe dari kesalahan gramatikal, yaitu Omission, Addition, Misordering dan Misformation. Dan penyebab terjadinya kesalahan gramatikal di kategorikan menjadi empat, yaitu, Intralingual transfer, Interlingual transfer, Context of learning dan communication strategy.
Kata kunci : recount , biografi, gramatikal
Learning a new language or foreign language will face us with the study of two languages in contrast. The first is our mother tongue and the second one is the target language. According to Brown, H.D (1993) the principal barrier to acquire a new language is the interference of the first language system, and by the structural analysis of the two languages will result in a taxonomy of linguistic contrast between them and we will be able to understand the difficulty of the learner. Therefore, the error analysis is needed in order to get the evidence of how the language are learned or acquired, and know the procedures or the strategies of the learner in learning a new language, Corder (1967:167). Moreover, this study will focus on grammatical error analysis. Francis, W. Nelson (1954) stated the “ Three Meanings of Grammar”, the first is Grammar, which is a set of formal patterns in which the words of a language are arranged in order to convey larger meaning”; the second is “ grammar, which is the branch of linguistic science which is concerned with the description, analysis,
and formulization of formal language patterns” and the third is “ grammar is linguistic etiquette”. Grammatical error could be used to know the difficulty that the student face during the process of learning new language and help them revise their ability, Brown, H.D (1993).
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a. What types of grammatical error are made by the first-year students of senior high school in writing recount text?
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b. What is the source of the grammatical errors the students make in writing recount text?
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a. To know the types of grammatical error made by the first-year students of senior high school in writing recount text
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b. To know the source of grammatical errors the students made in writing recount text.
The data of this study were taken from the texts written by 10th grade students in senior high school SMA Negeri 2 Amlapura (a public school) and 10th grade students in senior high school SMA PGRI 1 Amlapura (a private school). From thirty total populations, ten data were randomly selected (Five data from each school). The data were originally made by the students with the theme is Biography. The students were not allowed to use any online translation devices and their textbook/schoolbooks. The study used the qualitative - descriptive method. The the data were analyzed to find the error in each text, later on the data were marked to find the most common error which the student made. Analysis activities and observation is related to the primary method of data collection used in this writing. The data were analyzed in two steps. First, analyzing the error they made using the theory proposed by Dulay, et al (1982 : 146-170) and analyzing the source of error the students made with the theory proposed by Brown, H.D (1993: 263-266).
The students from public school and private school both have English subject once in a week. The english subject is held for 90 minute. They used one or two books as refferences. Both schools also have additional lessons for English subject which could be taken by every student who wants to get more knowledge of English. Also , the private and public school use almost simillar syllabus in teaching English.
The students were instructed to write a recount text. The theme of the text is biography. Each student from both schools freely chose to write a biography about their idol or their friend. To know the types of error that were made by the students, texts were analyzed and compared. The error analysis which was used in this study
was based on Dulay’s Surface Strategy Taxonomy. In Surface Strategy Taxonomy, there are four main types of errors.
Omission is the type of error the students made when they formed an utterance but missed an item which should have appeared. The missing item could be nouns, verbs, adjectives and adverbs. When the item that must appear in well-formed utterance was absent, the utterance became odd, and the expression of utterance is not clear. In this case, some students did not put TO BE “is” in utterance which should have been well formed “So now he _ 18 years old”( Forth, line 4). Another case is they did not put “was” which represents a past tense “ When he _ in University..”(First, line 8)
This error is the opposite type of Omission. This is also the second stage of error that student could make in language acquisition, when the learner already acquired some target language rules. There are three classifications of Addition, they are; Addition ,Double Marking and Regularizarion
The error that mostly occured in this case was simple Addition. Simple Addition is type of error where there is a presence of an item that must not appear in well-formed utterance. Dulay, et al (1982: 156) stated that many addition errors are more accurately described as the failure to delete certain items required in some linguistic constructions, but not in others. This error can be seen in this sentence “Jokowi is a President of Indonesia”(First, line 2) the student added the determiner ‘a’ which changed the meaning of the sentence.
Misformation errors are characterized by the use of the wrong form of the morpheme or structure. While in Ommission errors the item is not supplied
at all in misformation errors the learners supply something although it is incorrect. There are three clasifications of misformation; they are; Alternating Form, Archie-Form and Regularization. The error that mostly occour in this case is Alternating Form. The students were confused which class of word to use, as shown in this sentence “ she was to be actress” (Third, line 8) this should be “ she became an actress”.
Misordering errors is the incorrect placement of morpheme in an untterance. This error appears because of the impact of different rules from the students’ mother tongue or first language with the new language. The case of this error is “ he po sting cover songs”(Forth, line 5) it should be “ he posting song covers”.
According to Brown, H.D (1993: 263-266) there are four categories of source of error in the students’ writing. They are Interlingual transfer, Intralingual transfer, Context of learning and Communication strategy.
After conducting the analysis of the types of error, the analysis of source of error was also conducted. The analysis was conducted based on Brown’s theory. Brown, H.D (1993: 263-266) devided the source of error into four categories; they are Interlingual Transfer, Intralingual Transfer, Context of Learning and Communication Strategy. The resulst as shown below;
Interlingual transfer commonly occurs to new language learners. The learner or in this case is the student, influenced by the role of their first language in the target language. This commonly happens because of the interference of the first language in language learning processes.
“ ..Province Bali” (Fifth, line 10) the correct one should be “Bali Province” The student used Indonesian language pattern in English which has a different grammatical rule from their first language. They just translated what was in their mind without knowing that it was wrong.
This source of error occurs when the students who haven’t mastered yet the target language; they generalized one rule to other. Most of this case happened in the use of tense. The error is classified as Misformation.
“ She was began her debut” (Third, line 8) the student generalized to be ‘was’ for past tense verb, meanwhile the student already used ‘began’ as verb for past tense.
Context of learning is a source of error that occurs when the teacher mislead the explanation based on the text book, or when the text book itself provides an explanation which is hard to understand or the student misinterpreted what their teacher told them. This was the lowest source of error and basically occured in
“Hey Guys”(Fifth, line 1); it should have been written “ Hey guys”. The student capitalized every noun or pronoun because they misinterpreted or did not put much attention to the use of capitalism.
This source of error occurs because of the student’ learning style. They tried to makes their own strategy to learn a new language and tried to deliver their massage in their own vision but unfortunately it can lead to an error.
“She hobbies is..”(Eighth, line 10) the student’s intention was to deliver the message of ‘what is her hobby’ but the innapropriate word choice turned into error.
The student wrote ‘she’ instead of the pronoun ‘her’ which showed a possession.
Based on the discussion from the previous chapter, it can be concluded that the process of learning a new language can be difficult when we did not put much attention to the rule of the new language itself. English has different language rule from our first language Bahasa. In English, we have to understand the grammatical rule so we can easily learn the language. When student haven’t mastered yet English. From this study, the grammatical error in writing recount text was found in four types of error; they are Omission, Addition, Misformation and Misordering. The most common error was Misformation (alternating form) which occured 80 times in 10 data and the lowest error was Misordering which occurred only 10 times in 10 data. The source of error in writing recount text can be categorized into four; they are Inter-lingual transfer, Intra-lingual transfer, Context of learning and Communication Strategy. The most common source of error was the Communication strategy which occurred when the student made their own strategy in learning English. The lowest source was Context of Learning.
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