Grammatical Errors Made By the Students of English Department UISU Year 2018 in Their Writing Class

Abstract

This research attempts to identify the grammatical errors produced by students of English Department of UISU year 2018 in their final paper of writing class. In particular, it attempts to classify the errors based on Surface Strategy Taxonomy proposed by Dulay, Burt, and Krashen (1982). The data used in this research are taken from the submitted assignments of English Department students of Universitas Islam Sumatera Utara year 2018 in General English, particularly nine students in writing class. The researcher found 178 errors in fourteen linguistic categories which are divided into four parts: omission, addition, misformation, and misordering. From all the four parts, the researcher discovered that the most frequent errors found are in the part of misformation (97 errors; 54.49%), followed by omission (38 errors; 31.11%), misordering (22 errors; 12.78%), and addition (20 errors; 11.11%). While from the linguistic categories, the three most frequent errors found are misformation of verbal (30 errors), misordering of complex sentence (20 errors), and omission of determiner (19 errors).