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THE ANALYSIS OF GRAMMATICAL ERRORS ON
STUDENTS’ GUIDED WRITING
Dwitiya Ari Nugrahaeni
ABSTRACT
This study examined the sources of errors produced by students in Guided Writing class. The research question was asked “What are the sources of learners‟ grammatical errors in the students‟ Guided Writing drafts?”. Fourteen participants from the Guided Writing class were selected to be the participants of this study. The data were obtained from fourteen students‟ first drafts. The analysis used steps suggested by Corder (1974) in Ellis and Barkhuizen (2005) which included: (1) collection of a sample of learner language, (2) identification of errors, (3) description of errors, and (4) explanation of errors. To find out the sources of the grammatical errors, individual interviews were held. The results of the study revealed that intralingual errors were more significant than interlingual errors. This result supported several previous findings found by Richards (1971), AbiSamra (2003), Bataineh (2005), Husada (2007) and Sattayatham & Honsa (2007). The results also supported several previous finding which viewed that interference of L1 was not the major factor in student‟s production of errors in L2 whereas the students‟ competency in acquiring L2 played more significant roles (Richards, 1971 in Darus & Subramaniam, 2009; Dulay, Burt & Krashen, 1982).
Key words:error, grammatical error, error analysis, sources, interlingual, intralingual.
Introduction
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writing in L2, learners need more attempt in gaining, formulating, and analyzing ideas. They do not only gain the ideas but also have to deliver them in L2 which needs their proficiency in exploiting the strategies needed (ibid.).
This complex area of writing makes it impossible for the learners, especially those who learn English as the target language, not to produce errors. According to Dulay, Burt, and
Krashen (1982) errors are the parts of the students‟ language production that deviate from the
norm of language. This flaw is an inevitable part in learning a language. Brown (1980) in Darus and Ching (2009) argues that error is something that cannot be avoided. Error has become the
part of students‟ learning and it is natural. Corder (1981) states that error is something that can be committed by both native speakers and the language learners. However, both speakers show
different errors. For the native speakers, error can occur as the „breaches of the code‟, while error
for the non-native speakers is the parts of the language production which are different from what native speakers produce. Chomsky (1965) in Dulay, Burt, and Krashen (1982) differentiates errors based on the factors that cause it to happen. The first one is performance error which is caused by the carelessness of the students. This type of error was then called mistake. The second type is competence error which is caused by the lack of knowledge in using the language.
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level, however, errors still occur. Darus and Ching (2009) believe that intralingual errors may be caused by failure to understand and apply the rules in L2. Brown (1994) in Darus and Ching (ibid.) explaines that at the early stages of learning a second language, learners may be influenced mostly by their first language, but once they have acquired some rules in L2, more intralingual errors take place. In regards to the error production, many studies showed that
interlingual error is not the main factor that causes the error to occur in the students‟ writing.
Richards (1971) in Darus and Subramaniam (2009) showed that interference from the native language was not the key factor in the way learners construct sentences in the target language. In many research, researchers gave more attention to intralingual and developmental theory.
Many studies have conducted the analysis on students‟ errors. There are two theories
that are used to analyze the errors. Until 1960s, contrastive analysis (CA) was applied (Ellis & Barkhuizen, 2005). Wardhaugh (1983) as stated in Husada (2007) believes that CA predicts the error which can occur in learning the target language by contrasting the linguistic system of L1 and the target language. Ellis and Barkhuizen (2005) mention one more major purpose of the CA, which is to inform which parts of the target language that the teachers need to teach. However, CA gained many protests because the errors that CA predicted to occur did not occur but those which are not predicted did occur. Besides that, the differences of those two languages do not become the major source of error in the target language (Dulay, Burt, Krashen, 1982).
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Ellis and Barkhuizen (2005) believes that the analysis on students‟ errors can be done by
examining the linguistic context where the errors occur. Corder (1974) in AbiSamra (2003) suggests that error analysis has two objectives. The theoretical objective provides ways for researchers to see what and how learners learn the second language, and the applied objective enables the learner to learn more extensively. Thus, error analysis provides large space of analyzing the influence of developmental process in producing the errors. The error analysis will be helpful for the teachers to see the areas of L2 that still needs to be emphasized.
The study of error in writing has been the subject of many studies. Researchers are intended to find out what the causes of errors in students‟ productions of language are. Richards (1971) in Darus and Ching (2009) argued that error made by the learners appeared because of the interference of the strategies they used in acquiring the language, especially the L2. AbiSamra (2003) carried out a study which focused on indentifying, describing, categorizing, and diagnosing errors in students writing. The study involved 10 students who were in grade 9. They shared the same backgrounds: they had been learning English since kindergarte, they were taught
by American and Canadian teachers, and they spoke Arabic in their daily life. From the students‟
writing about „planning for the future‟, AbiSamara (ibid.) concluded that 64.1% of the errors were caused by intralingual aspects, while the rest was caused by interlingual or transfer from their L1. Her conclusion was also supported by Lance (1969), Richard (1971), and Brudhiprabha (1972) in AbiSamara (ibid.) who mentioned that only one third of all errors made by second language learners could be included in interlingual errors.
Another study was done by Bataineh (2005). She analyzed the use of indefinite article in the the composition written by 209 Jordanian students. Their age ranged from 18 to 23 years
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English?‟, „Yarmouk University campus‟, „violence in movies‟, „car accident‟, or „my favorite
author/story/poet‟. Based on her identification, she found out that language transfer or
interlanguage aspect played a very minimal role in the students‟ errors. She also concluded that
from all errors that she found, only one error could be included in interlingual error. The majority of the errors were caused by the developmental factors and the common learning strategies.
Sattayatham and Honsa (2007) analyzed the errors in the writing of 237 Medical students in Mahidol University, Thailand. The students were asked to translate a paragraph from the Thai language to English. After that, they were asked to write their opinion about medical ethics. The result of the study showed that errors could be caused by both interlanguage and intralanguage factors. However, they found that the interference of mother tongue was in smaller proportion than the interference of the rules applied in English.
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Although there had been a lot of research which prove that intralingual errors account
more on the second language students‟ errors, there were still a small number of research
investigating the source of those intralingual errors. In fact, knowing the source of errors in
students‟ production of language is very beneficial. Teachers can be more aware of what things
cause the students to produce the errors (ibid.). Teachers can also identify the specific source of errors to then design more effective ways materials and ways of teaching. Darus and Subramaniam (2009) add that knowing the source of error can prepare the teachers to help the learners facing and overcoming their difficulties in producing L2. However, only the study conducted by Husada (2007) explored more on the source of the intralingual errors. Realizing that understanding the source of errors is very beneficial and the number of studies investigating it is not sufficient, this research aims at investigating the sources of the errors in students‟
writing. The research question that will be answered in this study is “What are the sources of the
learners‟ grammatical errors in the students‟ Guided Writing drafts.”
The Study
1. Context of the study
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understanding of grammar in form of written production. The purpose of this class was to prepare the students to continue to the higher stages of writing.
2. Participants
The participants of this study were fourteen students who were enrolled in the Guided Writing class in the second semester of academic year 2011/2012. The method that was used in selecting the participants was random sampling. The participants ranged in age from 17 to 18 years old and all of them belonged to the class year 2011. There were two males and twelve females in this study. Among those fourteen participants, four of them were repeaters. The participants had been learning English in a formal setting for about seven to eleven years. All of them were Indonesians who spoke Bahasa Indonesia in their daily communication and English was their second language. Regarding nationality, language background, educational level and age, the participants could be considered homogeneous.
3. Materials
In this class, there were three „in-class writing‟ assignments with the topics: past narration – comic storytelling, present narration – what do you usually do in your holiday?,
and movie review. The length of each writing was about one until two pages and ranged from 200 to 350 words. Because of the time constrain, this study used the second writing assignment which required the students to write present narration about what they usually do in their holiday. This study would only use the students‟ first drafts because these drafts would best represent their way of thinking before they got feedback from the teacher. Before the drafts were returned back to the students to be revised, the teacher, who was also a native
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that were corrected: grammar, word choice, content, spelling and punctuation. This study focused on the linguistics errors only, therefore, only grammatical errors were analyzed. The word choice and content of the writing were not included because they were subject to the
teachers‟ preferences and the context, and thus could affect the objectivity of this study.
4. Data collection
There were two steps of data collection in this study: collecting the samples of
learners‟ language and interview. In collecting the samples of the learners‟ language, I
collected and copied the students‟ first drafts with the corrections on them from the teacher.
The second step was done through individual interview. The interview was held by using the
participants‟ native language (Bahasa Indonesia) to avoid problems in communication
(Husada, 2007). In attempting to find out the sources of the grammatical errors, the participants were asked to see the sentences in their writing where they produced errors in. They were asked to explain the reason why they produced such sentences. From this, the
students‟ way of thinking could be revealed and the source of errors could be identified. The results of the interviews were transcribed to be analyzed further.
5. Data analysis
In conducting the error analysis, this research followed the steps mentioned by Corder (1967) in Ellis and Barkhuizen (2005). They were: 1) the collection of a sample of
learner language, 2) identification of error where there is an evaluation of the learners‟
production compared to what it supposed to be according to the grammar rules, 3) the description of error, and 4) the explanation of errors. After collecting all data, the grammatical error analysis of the participants‟ writing was carried out. The error marking in
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being studied in this research. From all error aspects found, I selected the grammatical errors only to be analyzed further. The purpose of this study was to classify errors based on two
different sources: interlingual (the participant‟s mother toungue) and intralingual (their learning strategies). In analyzing the intralingual errors, this study used the sources of error suggested by James (1998). The strategy involved (1) false analogy (a kind of over-generalization), (2) misanalysis, (3) incomplete rule application (a kind of under-generalization), (4) exploiting redundancy, (5) overlooking co-occurrence restrictions, (6) hypercorrection, and (7) system simplification.
Discussion
After all drafts had been analyzed and investigated, this study found 274 grammatical deviances in the students‟ drafts. Among those deviances, 255 or 93.07% could be included as
errors, while 19 or 6.93% belonged to mistakes. Concerning the research question “What are the
sources of the learners‟ grammatical errors in the Guided Writing drafts”, the finding showed that out of 255 errors, 183 or 71.77% were intralingual errors, and only 43 or 16.86% belonged to interlingual errors. This finding supported some previous studies (e.g. Richards, 1971; AbiSamra, 2003; Bataineh, 2005; Husada, 2007; Sattayatham & Honsa, 2007) which confirmed
that errors were not only caused by the interference of learners‟ L1, in fact, intralingual factors
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Between mistakes and errors, James (1998) suggests that errors are the learners‟
productions of language which are unintentional and are not self-corrigible, while mistakes can be intentional or unintentional but they are self-corrigible. Self-corrigible here means that the learners can spot their mistakes and reconstruct the sentence in a correct form. Ellis and Barkhuizen (2005) in Husada (2007) mention two ways to differentiate learners‟ errors and mistakes. The first way is by checking the participants, whether they can reconstruct and make the sentence correct. For example in the sentence:
We always *watching TV…. . [We always watch TV…] (Participant G).
Here, when the participant was asked, he directly pointed out his mistake and he was able to provide the correct form of the sentence. The second way is to see the frequency of the learners in producing ungrammatical forms. When they consistently produce the wrong forms, then those are errors. However, when the learners produce wrong forms but in other sentences they can provide the correct ones, then those are categorized as mistakes. Yet, this study found an interesting fact. One participant was repeatedly wrote wrong form of present sentences, which is subject + verb+s/es (e.g. I goes, I feels ). She used this form in almost all subjects without
Intralingual 71.77% Interlingual
16.86 %
Developmental 5.88%
Induced 5.49%
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considering the subject-verb agreement. When she was asked to compare her correct sentences and the wrong ones, she immediately mentioned that the correct ones were wrong and she chose the ungrammatical sentences. Therefore, because of her inability to choose the correct forms of the sentences, those deviances were included as errors.
Interlingual errors
Interlingual errors are defined by Corder (1983) in Ellis and Barkhiuzen (2005) as the result of mother tongue influences. Weinreich (1953) in AbiSamra (2003) believes that
interlingual errors are the norm deviances of language which are caused by the learners‟
familiarity with more than one language. Because the participants‟ mother tongue is Bahasa
Indonesia, it is undeniable that Bahasa Indonesia affects several participants‟ sentences. For
example, the use of to infinitive after the verb let in the sentence
My parents let me *to do anything in my house. [My parents let me do anything in my
house.] – (Participant A).
Participant A explained that he only translated the sentences from Bahasa Indonesia. In Bahasa Indonesia, memperbolehkan (let) commonly collocates with the word untuk (to). Therefore, he used the word to. In fact, Azar (1999) explains that let is followed by simple form of verb, not an infinitive.
Another example of negative transfer from the first language was the use of with to form adverbs in the sentence
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In Bahasa Indonesia, adverbs are marked by the word dengan (with), for example, dengan lambat (slowly), dengan cantik (beautifully). In English, many adverbs are formed from an
adjective + -ly (Murphy, 2004) (e.g. slowly, quickly, or beautifully). However, because of the
learners‟ inadequacy to acquire the rule in English, they provided different form of words.
Unfortunately, this difference could not be realized by Participant I and she directly translated the word from her L1. She actually wanted to form an adverb of happy, however, she mentioned that she referred to her mother tongue when she wrote this sentence and it resulted to the deviation of happily into with happy.
Intralingual errors
“Intralingual errors are the negative transfer within the target language.” (Brown, 1980, p. 173). Richards (1971) in Darus and Ching (2009) argues that intralingual errors reflect the
general characteristics of L2 rules. Those errors show the students‟ competency in a certain
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The first source of errors found in this study is misanalysis. In this study, misanalysis was found to be the most dominant category. According to James (1998) misanalysis occurs when the learners have formed hypotheses of L2 items, but the hypotheses are unfounded. Husada (2007) gives an example of the wrong use of are in the sentence An orange and black bird *are sitting in that tree. Several participants thought that an orange and black bird are two
different nouns, therefore, they used the auxiliary are. The examples of misanalysis in this study are the wrong use of –ed and –ing adjective as seen in these examples:
1. It‟s so *bored.[It‟s so boring.] (Participant B)
2. She laughs because I and my family feel *annoying with her shoes. [She laughs because
my family and I feel annoyed with her shoes.] (Participant E)
Participant B and E failed to know the different use of –ed and –ing adjectives. Willis (1991) states that –ing adjectives are used to describe the effect that something has on your feelings, and –ed adjectives are used to describe people‟s feeling (p.46). Therefore, because the subject it in
0 10 20 30 40 50 60
MA OG
ER OCR HC
IRA FA
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Participant B‟s sentence caused boredom to her, she should use boring. Whereas, because
Participant E wanted to show what she and her family felt, she should use annoyed instead of annoying.
Other examples of misanalysis occurred in the use of wrong verb forms due to the
participants‟ wrong assumption of the function of the verbs:
3. After that, at home I just *watching film. [After that, at home I just watch film.]
(Participant J)
4. We will stay home, *playing cards, or *playing monopoly, and *watching TV. [We will
stay home, play cards, or play monopoly, and watch TV.] (Participant L)
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The word cakes was thought to be the main noun.
My family always *spend the holiday …
My family always spends
the holiday … My family was misinterpreted as a plural noun. The *most happiness
moment is … The happiest moment is … The noun happiness was thought to be an adjective. A nickname for *the
my mother‟s room. Misinterpreted the words my mother‟s room as an exact place that needed preposition at.
The second category was overgeneralization. According to James (1998) overgeneralization occurs when the learners “overindulgence one member of a set and underuse
others in the set.” (p.187). Richards (1970) in AbiSamra (2003) explains that overgeneralization
may be caused by the learners‟ intention to reduce the linguistic burden they have to face by
applying other structures that they have already known in the target language. The example found in this study was the overuse of indefinite article in this sentence:
I watch *a television. [I watch television.] (Participant C).
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writing, she added an before it. However, that sentence does not require any article. It does not need an indefinite article because television is something definite. Nevertheless, it does not need the definite article either because as what Murphy (2004) explains that the article the is used before the word television if what we mean is the television as a set of thing. If we make use the function of the television, which is we watch it, it is commonly used without the.
Overgeneralization also can be seen in the overuse of present verb (verb+s/es) in this sentence:
I *leaves home in the morning and *comes back at night. [I leave home in the morning
and come back at night.] (Participant B)
Participant B showed that she tried to be consistent with her previous knowledge that one way to mark present sentences was to add -s after the verbs. However, she did not pay attention to the subject and caused the verbs not to agree with the subject.
The third source was exploiting redundancy.Exploiting redundancy can be described as the omission of the grammatical features that do not contribute to the meaning of the utterances. (James, 1998 in Ellis and Barkhiuzen, 2005). Exploiting redundancy can be illustrated in the omission of verb and possessive marker in these sentences
1. We *back home …. [We go back home …] (Particpant I)
2. I with my friends go to our classmates* home. [(My friends and I) go to our
classmate‟s homes.] (Participant D)
From examples 1, it is clear that participant I omitted the verb go. She explained that the adverb back could serve as a verb and had the same meaning with go back or return, therefore, she did
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omitted the possessive marker „s. It is obvious that she only considered the information that she wanted to deliver and forgot to pay attention to the possessive marker. From the interviews, the thing that could be inferred from both Participant I and D was that the use of grammatical elements were not really important as long as they felt that people could understand their sentences.
The fourth source of error is overlooking cooccurence restriction. Richards (1983) in Husada (2007) argues that learners sometimes fail to view the rule of grammar existing in the sentence. James (1998) gives an example of overlooking cooccurrence restriction in the use of the word quick and fast. Learners may think that those words share the same meaning and function because they are synonymous. In fact, they carry their own functions in the sentence. We can say fast food, but we cannot say quick food. This source of errors was shown in the misformation of the verb in this sentence:
I also have a tradition after *watch a movie. [I also have a tradition after watching a
movie.] (Participant N)
Here the participant stated that she chose to use present verb (watch) because she only focused on the tense. Because she was asked to write a present narration, she was concerned with the present tense form of verbs. She ignored the fact that she used the verb watch after the preposition after. Willis (1991) states that “if the subject of main clause and the time clause are
the same, you sometimes omit the subject in the time clause and use a participle as a verb” (p.
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I *look they very happy. [I see they (are) very happy.] (Participant I)
That sentence showed that Participant I used the verb look where actually what she wanted to say required the verb see. She stated that she used the word look because she thought that all words
which carried the meaning of „seeing something‟ could be used interchangeably. However, the use of look was different from see. According to Collins Cobuild Dictionary (2006), look means directing eyes to one direction to see something clearly, and see means realizing something by observing it. Therefore, because knowing that people were happy was done trough observing, the correct verb for her sentence was see.
The fifth source of intralingual errors is hypercorrection. Hypercorrection occurs when the learners over monitor their L2 output by attempting to be consistent (James, 1998). Hypercorrection could be found in these sentences
1. … then I make *a breakfast to my parents. […then I make breakfast (for) my parents.]
(Participant J)
2. Please forgive me and I *wouldn’t do the mistake again. [Please forgive me and I will
not do the mistake again.] (Participant H)
In the first example, Participant J felt that the sentence could be correct if she added the indefinite article. Because of having the fear to make error, she was too focused on how to make the sentence looked correct. In fact, breakfast was an uncountable noun, therefore it did not need any articles. While in the second example, participant H stated that she actually intended to use will instead of would. Nevertheless, because she realized that she did the mistake in the past, she
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it is in the past tense, it should use would. This example shows that because the participant tried to be consistent with the rules she had acquired before, she ignored the structure of the sentence.
The sixth source of errors is incomplete rule application. James (1998) in Ellis and Barkhuizen (2005) explains that incomplete rule application is the opposite of overgeneralization (under-generalization) and could be found in the failure to make use of word order. The wrong use of conjunction in the sentence could be included as hypercorrection as seen in this sentence
… and clean my aquarium. *In order to, I can enjoyed watching film … [… and clean
my aquarium so that I can enjoy watching film …] (Participant J)
In writing that sentence, Participant J stated that she knew the meaning of the conjunction in order to. However, because of the lack of grammar comprehension, she thought that she could
put it everywhere in the sentence without making necessary adjustment to the sentence. In fact, Azar (2004) and Cowan (2008) mention that the conjunction in order to should be followed by infinitive. It could not be followed by a clause or a complete sentence.
The last source of errors is false analogy. James (1998) points out that false analogy is the
error where “the learner wrongly assumes that the new item B behaves like A.” (p. 185). One
example is the wrong transformation of adverb in this sentence
Not all of children can forget her mother‟s milk *fastly. [Not all children can forget her
mother‟s milk fast.] (Participant E)
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adverbs of manner which have the same form and same meaning as the adjective forms (e.g. fast, hard, and late). Therefore, the adjective fast can also act as an adverb without having any additional suffixes.
This study also found several errors which could not be included in interlingual or
intralingual. It was found that those errors were not interfered by both the learners‟ L1 and L2.
Those errors were categorized as developmental errors and induced errors.
Developmental errors
According to Dulay, Burt, and Krashen (1982) developmental errors are errors which are similar to errors made by children who have the target language as their first language. Richards (1971) in Darus and Subramaniam (2009) explains that there are no interference of any languages in the developmental errors, in fact, those errors show some basic characteristics of language acquisition. Dulay, Burt, and Krashen (1982) give an example,
Dog eat it.
The missing article and wrong use of tense may be attributed to developmental errors
because those errors are also found in children‟s speech who learn English as their first language.
The example of developmental errors found in this study was,
There is *many scene of song. [There are many musical scenes.] (Participant N)
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by putting together all content words, like nouns and verbs (Ellis, 1997) without making adjustment to the rules in the sentence.
Induced errors
In James (1998), Stenson (1983) states that induced errors are the
learner errors that result more from the classroom situation than from either the students‟ incomplete competence in English grammar (intralingual error) or first language interference (interlingual errors). (p.189)
This category of errors occurs when the learner is misled by his or her learning environment. James (1998) divides induced errors in three based on their sources: material-induced error, teacher-talk induced error, and exercise-based induced errors. One example found in this study which is in line with this explanation was:
Watching a movie will be more *pleased when … [Watching a movie will be more
enjoyable when …] (Participant N)
Participant N explained that she did not know English word of menyenangkan (enjoyable, interesting, pleased) and she asked her friend for the translation. However, not knowing the
structure of the sentence, her friend mentioned the word pleased and she directly put it in her sentence.
However, Stenson (1983) in James (1998) also suggests that these errors could be very similar to intralingual errors in which the learner fails to make secondary change in the things being learned and tends to use one type of structure only. This study found several induced errors, the example is as follow:
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Here, the participant mentioned that in his learning process, he learnt that a noun should be preceded by an article. In fact, the use of a definite article in that sentence was not necessary because he did not refer to a set of television, but to the activity of watching television Murphy (2004).
Conclusion
The results of this study show that the intralingual errors became the considerable source of errors committed by the students in acquiring and applying grammar in their writing. This study found 274 deviances where 255 of them or 93.07% belonged to errors, while 19 or 6.93% were mistakes. Among those errors, 183 or 71.77% were intralingual errors, and only 43 or 16.86% belonged to interlingual errors. These results agreed with several previous arguments
which view that interference of L1 is not the major factor in student‟s production of errors in L2.
It showed that the students‟ competency in acquiring rules and characteristics of L2 played more
significant roles (Richards, 1971 in Darus & Subramaniam, 2009; Dulay, Burt & Krashen, 1982). Concerning the intralingual errors, this study found that misanalysis was the major source of errors. From 183 intralingual errors, 57 or 31.15% belonged to misanalysis, while 29 or 15.85% were due to both overgeneralization and exploiting redundancy. 27 or 14.75% were caused by both overlooking cooccurrence restriction and hypercorrection, 10 or 5.46% were included as incomplete rule application, while only 4 or 2.19% errors belonged to false analogy.
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because of the time limitation, they forgot to correct their previous mistake. Because of the
participants‟ ability to recognize and correct those deviances, mistakes were not included as errors and could be considered insignificant. The second source was the developmental errors
which were caused by the participant‟s inability to combine their ideas into grammatically
correct sentences. Some of the participants mentioned that they just put all the things they wanted to deliver in the sentence. These errors were similar to the process of learning a first language (Dulay, Burt & Krashen, 1982). The third source was induced errors which were the result of being misled by the participants‟ learning environment (James, 1998). Some participants stated that they asked the translation to their friend or they tried to look for it on the internet and they used it in their sentence without making necessary adjustment. From this reason, this study also found that not all learning supporting medium (e.g. peer help, dictionary, online search) could be utilized directly by the students. They still needed to modify the output based on the structure of the sentence, and this ability was what lack from the participants..
However, this study still has some limitations. The first limitation is the number of participants (n=14). Having bigger number of participants for further study will be more beneficial for the reliability of the study. The second limitation is on the type of writing that was used. This study only used present narration and therefore only focused on limited grammatical features. Wider variety of writing would be favorable in finding more variety of errors.
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use of certain rules. Hopefully, this study will be beneficial for English teachers to recognize not only what errors produced by the students but also the sources and reasons behind them. Furthermore, by understanding the sources of errors, I hope that English teachers will be able to apply suitable explanation, methods, and exercise to anticipate the students‟ errors so that effective and efficient teaching and learning process will be gained.
Acknowledgement
I would not be able to finish this thesis without the help and support from several individuals around me. Therefore, I would like to express my deepest gratitude to Allah SWT for all of his greatness to make everything possible for me. I would like to express my sincere gratitude to my supervisor, Hendro Setiawan Husada, M.A. for his immeasurable supervision and help during the completion of my thesis, and also my examiner, Martha Nandari, M.A. for the fundamental suggestion and guidance for this thesis. Special thank is given to Andrew Thren for his help in collecting the data and doing the analysis. I also want to say thank you to all of my participants for their help in the process of collecting data.
I am especially grateful to Ibu, Bapak, Mbak Ifa, Om Ndut, and the cute Nares for the endless patience, support, help, and also for keeping me believe that I can do this. Big thank is
also given to Febrika „Temon‟ for providing me immense support and restless companion. My
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