A Morpho-Syntactic Error Analysis of Students‘ Writing at the State Madrasah Tsanawiyah of Sukoharjo

Bayu Nandra Ramadhan

doi:10.20414/edulangue.v1i1.193

Abstract

English is considered as an Indonesian students‘ foreign language which is not used frequently in their daily conversations. Since writing in English is a challenging experience for Indonesian students, they sometimes commit errors in grammar and sentence structures. Learners‘ errors were considered as the best sources to identify students‘ writing skills deficiency. They can be useful for teachers, learners, textbook providers, education system and so on. This descriptive qualitative research investigated the Indonesian EFL linguistics taxonomy of morpho-syntactic errors and the sources of the errors. The participants of the study were the third graders of the State Madrasah Tsanawiyah Sukoharjo. They were asked to write a descriptive text about their mother. After collecting the data and categorizing and identifying the erroneous areas in their work, the data were analysed using the linguistic taxonomy of errorscoined by Keshavarz (2006). The results of this study showed that the most frequent part of the students‘ errors based on morpho-syntactical errors was "errors due to a lack of concord" and the minimum frequency was found to be ?wrong word order?. Then, the most common error viewed from the sources of the errors was overgeneralization error, and the minimum frequency was related to ?faulty categorization.

Highlights

Indonesian people are not the native of English
The data were gathered from written productions of descriptive text of five students of State Madrasah Tsanawiyah of Sukoharjo
After the data were gathered, they were read carefully and the erroneous parts were identified. They were categorized and analysed based on linguistic taxonomy of errors proposed by Keshavarz (2006) which includes the classifications of morpho-syntactical errors and sources of the errors

Summary

Introduction

Indonesian people are not the native of English. It means that their mother tongue is not English. Students are usually asked to write an essay or text using English. In this case, students commonly transfer their native language into the target language (English). Some aspects of English such as grammar, vocabulary, spelling, as well as punctuation still become a task for them to master. In other words, those aspects are worth their attention as a central power to be successful in writing English

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Discussion

Conclusion