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.
