Report Text on Indonesian General Election 2014: A Grammatical Error Analysis

Abstract

This study aims at investigating the grammatical errors in report text writing made by the students of Department of English of FIB-USU. The Objectives of this study are three folds; to find out the categories of grammatical errors; to apply error analysis procedure in investigating the grammatical errors; and to explain the source of errors. This study engages with a qualitative descriptive approach, The data of this research are obtained from the report text writings written by 20 of undergraduate students of Department of English, at the sixth semester. They are assigned to write a report text on Indonesian General Election 2014, with the length of the writing as 150 up to 250 words in count. This study finds that the students make two major grammatical error categories in their writings; morphological error and syntactical error. Morphological error category is subcategorized into the use of affixes, the use of derivational morpheme and inflectional morpheme. Meanwhile, syntactical error category is subcategorized into the use of article, the use of relative pronoun, and the use of SVA in terms of past tense agreement and number agreement. Based on the error analysis procedure applied, firstly the data are collected, after then the data are identified to find the errors. Next, the data are classified according to its categories of errors whether belong to morphological or syntactical. ‘Then, the errors are quantified to gather the frequency of errors occurrences. In analyzing the source of error, itis found that the errors caused by two major sources, namely intralanguage error (inadequate competence in applying L2 grammar) and interlanguage error (negative interference from L1). From the analysis, itis found that the students commit making grammatical error in their writing, Eventually, in order to avoid the students in making another grammatical error, the writer has suggested taking out remediation based on each problematic area of grammatical error categories.