AN ANALYSIS OF STUDENTS’ GRAMMATICAL ERRORS IN WRITING DESCRIPTIVE TEXT

The objective of this research was to figure out of the students‟ grammatical errors, cause of errors and the percentage of error occurance in writing descriptive text. This research used qualitative research method and content analysis as research design. The source of this research was tenth grade students of SMAN 5 Kota Serang. To obtain the data, the researcher used documentation and interview as the instruments.  The errors were classified based on strategy surface taxonomy by Dulay and specified on four types of grammar; subject and verb agreement, tense, pronoun, and preposition. The result of the study reveals that all the students in class X-5 did error and the errors commonly occured in using tenses (49,74%) and followed by the use of pronoun (25,65%). Those errors mostly occured because of intralingual and developmental errors or lack of students‟ knowledge in English (71,62%) and also the interference of students‟ native language (28,38%). Based on the findings, teachers are expected to be more aware of students‟ difficulties in writing. The teacher can also develop students‟ mastery in writing by reading some particular texts.

keywords :error analysis, grammar, cause and source of errors