An analysis of morphological and syntactical errors on the English writing of junior high school Indonesian students

Abstract

Since English has been studied for many years in Indonesia, it is important to recognize some common errors that are produced by the learners in order to help them to improve teaching and learning strategies for the English language. Therefore, this research aims to investigate the errors that occur on students’ English writing at the morphological and syntactical levels and the factors that cause these errors. This qualitative descriptive research describes and investigates the errors and their factors. The result of the study shows that, firstly, the types of morphological errors occur in the omission, addition, and misformation which include the derivation, inflection, preposition, article, copula be, personal pronoun, auxiliary, and determiner. Secondly, syntactical errors occur in the omission, addition, misformation, and disordering which include the passive voice, tense, noun phrase, auxiliary, subject-verb agreement, and determiner. The two major sources of errors are the interlingual (first language interference) and intralingual factors.