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Library's collection Library's IT development CancelKnowing how learners acquire a second language is interesting. And the main
way of investigating it is by collecting and describing samples of learners' language
which, may focus on the kinds of errors they produced. In this study, the writer figures
out the syntactic errors found in journals, a kind of assignments in writing class,
written within one semester by ten students of Faculty of Letters in Petra Christian
University especially from the first writing class. The writer then classifies all syntactic
errors and finds out the most common error types. All is done in order to know the
students' capabilities in mastering English syntax which later will help both teachers to
give more stress on particular grammatical features and students to be more concerned
to the grammar they use.
By using descriptive method of research, the writer collects all the syntactic
errors found in students' journals. Then the data is classified and analyzed based on
some relevant underlying theories. They are Greenbaum's theory as the major and
supported by Francis' and Barron toefl's theories for English syntax, Ellis' and
Lightbown's for second language acquisition theories and also Dulay et. al's and
Corder's theories of error.
The collected data, syntactic errors in eighty journals written by ten students, is
classified and analyzed to find out the common types of errors as seen from the first to
the eight journals without any comparison done among them.
And the findings show that the common types of syntactic error students
produced in writing their journals are errors in four terms. In the term of verbs, the
types are errors in the use of auxiliary verbs, misuse of 'be', errors in agreement,
errors in the use of verb patterns, and in the use of tenses. And in term of nouns are
substitutions of singular noun for plural noun and the reverse, errors in the use of
noun determiners for count and noncount noun, 'a an' and 'the', and errors in the use
of pronouns functioning as subject, object, reflexive and possessive pronoun. The
others are errors in terms of prepositions?-misuse of preposition, missing and
unnecessary preposition and tense sequences