Students’ Subject-Verb Agreement Errors in Paragraph Writing Class

Abstract

Subject-verb agreement is an essential element to master by English Language Education Study Program (ELESP) students, who are prepared to be English teachers in the future. However, the researchers still find the fact that ELESP students make the errors on the agreement. For that reason, it would be significant to find out the errors made by the students as well as to discover the factors behind the errors. To achieve those purposes, the researchers conducted a document analysis and a semi-structure interview.The research results showed most of the errors belonged to misinformation category (71.4%) and were subsequently followed by omission category (17.9%) and addition category (10.7%). In addition, from the interview, the researchers also found five (5) major factors that caused the students to make the errors, namely interlingual error, ignorance of rule restrictions, incomplete application of rules, false concepts hypothesized, and carelessness. DOI: https://doi.org/10.24071/llt.2012.150204