CHAPTER I INTRODUCTION
A. Background
Language is one of the wonderful gifts that has been given by God to humanity. Language helps people to communicate each others, solve a number of the problems, and it can help us to make some achievements in life. Language is a tool or media for people to make more interactions one to another. Without language, it will be difficult for people to express their ideas, views, feelings, and intelectuality to human being. Therefore, it is very essential for people to learn and use a language well.
English is one of the languages which is used in many countries in the world. English language is the first foreign language in Indonesian schools until universities. Having studied English, the EFL students are expected to acquire some skills in English. Atkinson in Syatriana (2019) divides the four basic language skills that must be mastered by English learners, namely: listening, speaking, reading, and writing skills. Besides the four language skills, they should have capability in language components. One of the language components is grammar. The grammar component such as syntax, morphology and so on, the components should
be acquired by anyone who learns language, so they can use the language clearly, accurately, and effectively.
Writing is one of the important skill to master. It is a skill to formulate and organize ideas in the right words to transform and communicate the purpose to the reader by presenting it on a piece of paper (Sumarsih & Sanjaya, 2013). According to Kantor (2012), components of writing measure the writing productivity (example:
number of words or sentences), spelling and grammar, organization, vocabulary, and overall quality.
Grammar is one of the important components of language especially in writing. If we want to make a good writing, we have to understand well about the grammatical rules. According to Cook and Sutter in Cahyaningrum (2014), grammar is a set of rules which people speak and write. It means that grammar contains of the rules which make the words and their components are combined to make sentence both of spoken or written.
However, Indonesian learners still face difficulties in grammar, especially about the grammar that is applied in the writing form. Students often make errors on the use of grammatical structure in English writing because English grammar is more complicated than Indonesian. It is natural due to many aspects are caused by the EFL students to make errors. Sometimes mother tongue interference also becomes one of the causes.
Error is related to the students’ deficiency compotence, it means that students do not know about the language knowledge at all because they have not mastered it yet which it cannot be self-corrected (Solihah, 2017). It means that Error is unavoidable because it can happen in all components of English grammatical structure such as errors on using auxiliary verb, using verb, preposition, conditional sentence, etc. But, in this study the researcher is going to highlight about errors on the auxiliary verbs especially primary auxiliary verbs that consists of auxiliary is, am, are, do, does, did, have, has, had, etc, and errors on modal auxiliary verbs that consists of modal can, will, may, should, must, need to, etc. It is because of auxiliary verbs is the basic part in grammar, but based on some previous research, the auxiliary verbs errors still appear in the students’
writing.
The researcher chooses the EFL students from the third semester student of English Language and Literature Department at Alauddin State Islamic University Makassar because the researcher wants to know the types of error and its frequencies that can appear in students’ writing, especially in using auxiliary verbs. Even though, the students have learnt about writing or structure at the previous semester but in some previous research show that students still make errors in using auxiliary verbs, even they are in the seventh semester. It can be proved from the result of Agustin (2018) that conclude that the seventh semester students from English Teaching Department make five types of error in using auxiliary
verbs. Those are misordering of primary auxiliary verb, misformation of primary auxiliary verbs, omission of auxiliary verbs, addition of primary auxiliary verbs and addition of modal auxiliary verbs errors. It means that the students still make errors even they have learnt about writing or structure in the previous semesters.
However errors are regarded as substanctive things to students and teachers/lecturers since errors are the important part of learning process in order to get information. Corder in Cahyaningrum (2014) states that there are three functions of learners errors which are as follows: (1) They serve pedagogic purpose by showing teachers/lecturers what learners have learnt and what they have not yet mastered; (2) they serve a research purpose by providing evidence about how language are learnt; (3) they serve a learning purpose by acting devices by learners which can discover the rules of the target language. It means that error analysis contains of a lot of informations about the students difficulties in grammar, so the EFL student can try to understand and learn more about it and the teachers or lectures will help them to solve the grammatical problems itself.
Because of some reasons above, the researcher is interested in conducting a research about error analysis on students ability in using auxiliary verbs in writing essay. The researcher wants to conduct a research of the students’ auxiliary verb that has been studied by the third semester of English Language and Literature Department of Adab and Humanity Faculty at Alauddin State Islamic University of Makassar.
Therefore, the researcher proposes a research under the title “An Error Analysis on Using Auxiliary Verbs in Writing Essay”.