VOXRATEWATI.Com. By Wara Cypriano
AN
ANALYSIS OF GRAMMATICAL ERRORS IN ENGLISH WRITINGS ON UNDERGRADUATE STUDENTS OF
ENGLISH EDUCATION DEPARTMENT OF GANESHA UNIVERSITY
Siprianus Wara
English
Education Department, Faculty of Languages and Art
Post
Graduate Program
Ganesha
University of Education Singaraja
ABSTRAK
Paparan dalam artikel ini
memfokuskan pada analisis sejumlah kesalahan yang ditemukan dalam karangan
berbahasa Inggris oleh mahasiswa jurusan pendidikan bahasa Inggris semester dua
dan tiga jenjang pendidikan S-1 Universitas Pendidikan Ganesha Singaraja.
Kegiatan analisis yang dilakukan mengacu pada keseringan kesalahan yang ditemukan
dalam tulisan berbahasa Inggris yang ditulis oleh mahasiswa. Sasaran analisis
kesalahan yang dilakukan penulis yakni mengidentifikasi tulisan berbentuk genre
berupa recount text, narrative text dan free writing. Oleh karena itu penulis
mengakat judul dari article ini “ Analisis kesalahan tata bahasa dalam tulisan bahasa inggris mahasiswa
pendidikan bahasa inggris jenjang S-1 Universitas Ganesha Singaraja”.Berdasarkan
pada objek penelitian di atas maka ditemukan beberapa jenis kesalahan yang sering
muncul pada setiap genre yang dikategorikan dalam enam(6) bentuk kesalahan yang
memilki frequensi tertinggi yang diperoleh dalam setiap tulisan. Pada hasil
analisis yang dilakukan dalam paparan artikel ini yakni tensis dan penggunaan kata kerja, kata ganti, kata benda
tunggal dan jamak, bentuk kata dari
part of speech lainnya yang salah, kesalahan
penulisan dan jenis kesalahan lainnya.
Jenis kesalahan yang paling banyak dilakukan dari hasil analisis ini yakni
kesalahan tenses dan penggunaan kata kerja sebagai rangking kesalahan
tertinggi.
Kata-kata kunci: Analisis, frekuensi kesalahan gramatikal, karangan bahasa inggris
INTRODUCTION
This research is an
investigate a large number of errors found in the English writing on
undergraduate students of Ganesha university, especially provided an analysis
on frequent errors, to find useful pedagogical implications for English Grammar
in writing. The main objective of the current study is to
identify the English writing errors made in different text genres such as
recount, descriptive, and free writing by EFL students in Ganesha University of
Singaraja.
There are some skills in English
learning, one of them is writing. Writing is most complex and complicated among
the skills every second language learner is expected to be mastery in writing
skill. One can refer to cognitive abilities required in skill as one of the
challenging requirements of writing. The writers overcome the steps in writing,
namely prewriting, writing and editing, in order to come up with final product.
The skill of writing is required in a lot of situations including conveying and
maintaining knowledge as said by Trembley (1993) reports writing is a hard
skill. As
Hyland (2003) believes error commitment is somehow inevitable in writing by EFL
students because of the complexity of writing skills and because of the
simultaneous processes of learning English and learning the writing skill that
challenge the learners to a great extent. Research (Hyland, 2003; Ferris, 2002)
indicates that EFL writing generally suffers from more errors, is less fluent
and cohesive, and is shorter compared to other skills.
The
main objective of the current study is to identify the English writing errors
made in different text genres such as recount, descriptive, and free writing
made by EFL students in Ganesha University of Singaraja. Based on the above objective
the study is going to check whether each genre has particular types of errors.
According to the problems mentioned and purposes of the study the following
questions were formulated to be sought in the current study:
1. What kinds of error are conducted by EED of
undergraduate students of Ganesha university of Singaraja?
2. What are the
source of error is conducted by EED of undergraduate students of Ganesha
university of Singaraja?
3. How the undergraduate
students on EED of Ganesha university to enhance their writing accuracy, in
respect to error categories of recount, descriptive and free writing of genres?
THEORETICAL CONSIDERATION
The number of studies
conducted to investigate writing errors has been increased recently as writing
is considered an important academic skill in academic circumstances and outside
as well. It is clear that “writing structures our relations with others and
organizes our perception of the world” (Bazerman & Paradis, 1991, p. 3; as
cited in Khuwaileh & Al-Shoumali, 2000). Therefore, a brief background of
the theories that form a platform for the study of writing errors from an Error
Aanalysis perspective seems contributive.
Richards
and Schmidt (2002) stated that the terms mistake and errors are used
interchangeably in non-technical situations. Mistakes are made due to such
reasons as ignorance, lack of attention. Therefore is once attention is called
mistake, mistake can be corrected without any external assistance by the
person. On the other hand, errors are rule based; that is, inadequate mastery
of some target language rules leads to the production of linguistic items both
written and oral those are not acceptable and familiar to native or fluent
speakers. Two other important definitions are worth stating here. Norrish
(1987, p. 7) defines errors as “a systematic deviation, when learner has not
learnt something and consistently gets its wrong”. Brown (2000, p. 220) in his
analysis of Corder’s model (1971), states that “any sentence uttered by the
learner and subsequently transcribed can be analyzed for idiosyncrasies”. He
makes a distinction between overt and covert errors. “Overtly erroneous
utterances are unquestionably ungrammatical at the sentence level. Covertly erroneous
utterances are grammatically well-formed at the sentence level but are not
interpretable within the context of communication (Brown, 2000, p. 220)”. Thus,
to analyze students' errors, it is necessary to determine the sources of errors.
Regarding the aforementioned sources of errors, it could be understood that the
two main sources are intralingual and interlingual errors. Research shows that
students’ incomplete or wrong learning of the second language elements leads to
error commitments termed intralingual errors (Fang & Xue-mei, 2007). As
reported by Erdogan (2005) the outcome of forming concepts and formulating
hypothesis by learners who have obtained marginal knowledge of the second language
is the occurrence of intralingual errors. For instance, EFL writers fail to
complete a written task as required because of inadequate competence of the
target language lexical and syntactic elements, and the inadequacy occasionally
leads to some degrees of confusion regarding the new language that is supposed
to be mastered. The speech of second language learners also suffers from common
intralingual errors, though the errors can be analyzed by instructors in order
to identify the strategies employed by the learner.
Errors
that stem from first language interference are called interlingual or transfer
errors. In case transfer impedes the progress of learning the new language, it
is called negative transfer; however, if the transfer facilitates the progress
is considered as positive transfer. Selinker (1972) first used the term
interlingual. Selinker (1972) the term interlingual meant the systematic
knowledge acquired by the learner regarding the target language; the systematic
knowledge, however, was not similar to neither to learners’ mother language nor
to the target language. Transfer is defined as “a generalization of learned
responses from one type of situation to another (Webster's third new world
international dictionary, 1986)”
METHOD
This study applied a qualitative method. The
data is taken from the main participants of this study were total of 10 undergraduate
students in English program of Ganesha university. The participants’ are taken
randomly from one and second year students on semester 1 to 3 and also about
male or female students. The researcher took the data on the students writing
assignment. The students do not have supervisor in writing process and also do
not have an editor. The result of writing is pure of the students work
themselves. The passage is consists of 100 to 150 words genre such as recount,
descriptive and the text of free writing.
To
demonstrate the students’ ability to construct a string of well – connected
sentences that is grammatically and logically correct; with the congruence to
Halliday and Hassan (1976, as cited by Darus & Ching, 2009) in Ronald Candy S. Lasaten (2014)
Analysis of errors in the English writings of teacher education students”. The
linguistic errors found in their writings were analyzed and categorized
according to the Taxonomy of Errors patterned after the model of Darus and
Ching (2009), which categorizes errors as to: a) grammatical (prepositions,
articles, reported speech, singular/plural, adjectives, relative clauses,
infinitives, verbs and tenses, and possessive case); b) syntactic (coordination
and conjunctions, sentence structure, nouns and pronouns, and word order); c) lexical
(word choice); d) semantic (literal translation); and e) substance/mechanics
(punctuation, capitalization and spelling). Describing the
prevailing linguistic errors was further made. The data was also carried out to selected students for the
perceptive understanding about the errors they committed, particularly for
possible causes of these errors. Statistical tools such as frequency count (f),
percentage (%) and rank (r) were used to treat the data gathered
in the study.
FINDINGS
AND DISCUSSION
In
findings show that the top six error types are in tense and verb form,
spelling, use of pronoun, singular/plural form of nouns, parts of speech and
other type of error. Those are the errors are conducted by the students in
their writing. In the grammatical errors, there are so many aspects but the
researcher find out some errors as frequent in students writing result as data
to discuss in this research.
Table 1. The number of students writing samples from different genres
Genres
and numbers of students
|
Total
|
Recount
|
Descriptive
|
Free
writing
|
4
|
3
|
3
|
10
|
Materials and Instruments
The purpose of
obtaining data and identify the most common grammatical errors which may occur
in students’ writing, the researcher conducted this study by using the
following instruments for data collection: (1) Collecting the students writing
which are taken randomly such as male,
female from first until second year students. The results obtained 10 participants
whose overall language proficiency was at intermediate level. ( 2) Writing
Samples: The corpus on which this study was mainly based included recount text,
descriptive and free writing text.
Data
Collection Procedure
At
data collection, there were three different writing genres namely recount,
descriptive, and free writing. Their compositions are about three paragraphs,
and to write on their own without consulting their friends, teachers, or the
researcher. Moreover, they were not told about the area of their writing which
would be studied; had they been told, they might have underused or overused
such words. They had enough expertise in dealing with writing skill.
Table2. Types of grammatical errors
no
|
Errors in
|
Recount
|
Descriptive
|
Free
writing
|
Total
|
Percentage
|
1.
|
Tense and verb
form
|
6
|
9
|
9
|
24
|
26.97
|
2.
|
Pronoun
|
6
|
5
|
4
|
15
|
16.85
|
3.
|
Singular/plural
form of nouns
|
5
|
4
|
4
|
13
|
14.60
|
4.
|
Part of speech
|
4
|
3
|
5
|
12
|
13.48
|
5.
|
Spelling
|
4
|
4
|
3
|
11
|
12.36
|
6.
|
Other error
types
|
4
|
3
|
4
|
11
|
12.36
|
Total
|
29
|
29
|
31
|
89
|
100
|
According
to the data above and average number of
error there are 6 kinds frequent of errors are conducted by the
students in their writing. The error spread out in recount, descriptive and
free writing. There shows some numbers of error which divided into types of
grammatical error.
Types of errors in students writing
Errors in Tense and Verb Form
The
error in tense and verb form ranks the first among all the error which totals
at 24 and accounts for approximately 21,36 % of all error types. The tense
errors refer to using a wrong tense that does not correspond to the language context.
Errors in verb form means that writers may know what tense should be used in
the context, but write down the wrong verb form, as a result of not knowing the
correct form or forgetting to change the
verb to the needed form or changing into a wrong form. Some of the examples
from the data are as follows.
a.
This very important when you find good
relationship in the class (This is)
b.
Sometime drama bring news and social for
society (drama brings)
c.
He lazy in the class because he always
don’t understand (he is lazy) (he doesn’t)
d.
Drama can be lose the stress and be
funny together (Drama can be lost)
e.
and I very afraid look a old woman. ( I
was very afraid)
f.
I
wanted tell you my frightening dream in one night.
( I wanted to tell)
g.
but before to bedroom ( went to bedroom)
h.
and very be afraid. ( and was afraid)
Those
are erroneous bits of language and those in the brackets are one of the revised
versions according to the writers’ intention in their writings.
Verb form errors in the students’
writings can be mainly further subcategorized: a) lack or overgeneralization of
subject-verb (S-V) agreement of the 3rd person singular; b) confusing about
past tense (pt.) and past participle.
Error in pronoun
The
error in pronoun and all the error which totals at 15 and accounts for
approximately 13,35 % of all error types. The pronoun errors are errors always
do not correspond to language context. Some of the examples from the data are
as follows.
a.
When I ask his about the program or
something else (when I ask him)
b.
I don’t like his because he always finds
friends (I don’t like him)
c.
I and his make group partner ( I and him)
Error in
singular or plural nouns
A
lack of singular or plural markers and disagreement, which totally account for
about 13 with percentage 11.57 % .Plural –s in English appears. The
error in singular and plural which are total at 13 and accounts for are approximately 11.57 % of all error types.
The pronoun errors are errors always do not correspond to language context.
a.
When I was children live all families in
Pemaron village (when I was a children)
b.
I
and my brother always made frightening to all friend in the school ( to all
friends)
c.
I saw many old worker work at place (Many
all workers)
Errors in Spelling
Spelling
error is a frequent error type in all writing samples. There are 11 with
percentage 9,79 %. Memorizing words is one of difficult tasks. It is more
concerned during their high school years. When students are in high school,
teachers have rigid tasks about memorizing words and rigorous check with them. Some
examples from the data as follow: Therefore, misspelling in writing is a
serious problem. In the writing samples, some top spelling errors are as following:
alway (always), nowdays/nowaday (nowadays), ture (true) and turely (truely), unforgettable
(unforgettable), weather (whether), talktive (talkative). Other errors are
(beneficial), besises/beside (besides), choise (choice), cignificant
(significant), ecist (exist), experience (experience), funning (funny), heself
(himself), grammer (grammar), guidence (legend), luckly (luckily), meself
(myself), ourself (ourselves), theirselves (themselves), planing (planning).
Errors in
Parts of Speech
Error in parts of speech are 12 with consists of
percentage 10,68 %.
The students are often confused by the different forms of one word, its
noun, verb, adj., adv. etc. Some words with a suffix –ly are not adv. but adj..
If words like “lack” and “respect” are used as verbs, “lack .” and
“respect sb.” are used,
instead of “lack of .”, “respect for.”, in which “lack” and “respect” are nouns.
Those are some examples as following;
a) I become more and
more confidence. (confident)
b) It will be effected
not only the students’ successful but also their view of life. (affect, success
)
c) No one can success
so easy. (succeed, easily)
d) They lack of work
experience. (lack)
e) It’s their own
choose whether they help or not. (choice)
Other Error Types
Any
error is conducted by undergraduate students of Ganesha university as other
frequent error types include those on non-finite verbs, run-on sentences,
diction, clauses, and so on. The students may miss a possessive or use an unspecified
reference, making the meaning vague. Some example on the data as follow:
a) Help someone is not difficult to us.
(Helping)
b)
We should help strangers and it would bring lots of benefits, such as make us
more unite, make our life more easier, make the world more peaceful. (making,
united; making, easier, making)
c)
The best way to integrate into society that the whole society should encourage
the college students go into business. (is that, to go into)
d) I was attracted by her smile, her
smile made me feel comfortable and relaxed. (. Her smile/ , which)
e) After school, she went to teachers’
home, learned for two or three hours and then went back home, she must finish
her homework. (. She)
f) She never asked me
for anything but her gave me a lot. (she)
g) Everyone has own
dream. (his own)
The
sources of error in students writing
Based on the data have
discussion above, there are some sources of error in students writing as
follow:
a)In
the substitutive language, inappropriate L1 transfer arises. Apart from the
negative L1 transfer, the second reason for the errors is misapplying
avoidance.
b.)The
learners resort to L1, they find L1 cannot help, either they are ignorant of
the L1 equivalent, or L1 lacks an equivalent. The students must be awareness of
their errors. After the teaching practice, we find that classroom analysis and
instruction are real problem in learning EFL. They have difficulty in English
writing. Error correction is a cognitive process and errors cannot be removed
until they have a clear awareness of them. Therefore, it is necessary for
students to solve the errors in their writing.
Table 3. Summary of errors in the
English writing of the students
Grammatical
errors
|
Count
of Error (f)
|
Percentage
(%)
|
Hierarchy
|
Tense
and verb form
|
24
|
26.97
|
1
|
Pronoun
|
15
|
16.85
|
2
|
Singular/plural
form of noun
|
13
|
14.60
|
3
|
Part
of speech
|
12
|
13.48
|
4
|
spelling
|
11
|
12.36
|
5
|
Other error types
|
11
|
12.36
|
6
|
Total
|
|
100
|
|
CONCLUSION
Based
on the discussion above, the study mainly discusses the undergraduate students
as EFL learners’ most frequent errors in their topic-based writings. The top
six are the errors in tense and verb form, spelling, use of pronoun, singular/plural
form of nouns, parts of speech and other type of error. All of the errors
should aware by undergraduate students EFL learners in Ganesha university. And
those frequent errors should be their priority.
The
ultimate cause of the errors is learners’ linguistic ignorance of the teaching
and learning process. Due to lack of declarative knowledge, learners use
strategies to compensate for their ignorance. Instead of silence, learners try
to express themselves by alternative means. In the substitutive language,
inappropriate L1 transfer arises. Apart from the negative L1 transfer, the
second reason for the errors is misapplying avoidance. When learners resort to
L1, they find L1 cannot help, either they are ignorant of the L1 equivalent, or
L1 lacks an equivalent. The students must be awareness of their errors. After
the teaching practice, we find that classroom analysis and instruction are real
problem in learning EFL. They have difficulty in English writing. Error
correction is a cognitive process and errors cannot be removed until they have
a clear awareness of them. Therefore, it is necessary for the students.
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