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The Lexical errors commonly made by the students of writing I and writing IV at the Faculty of Letters, Petra Christian University

This study is about the lexical errors made by the
students of Writing I and Writing IV at the English Department,
of Petra Christian University. During their process of
acquiring English, they have learnt about grammar, syntax,
and also lexical items, or commonly known as vocabulary.
However, many of the students still make lexical errors in
writing paragraphs or essays.
The writer is interested in studying those errors
further. She is curious to know what lexical errors are
oommonly made by the students of Writing I and Writing IV.
However, she limits her study to verbs, nouns, and adjec-tives,
since they are considered the main parts of
speech. Then, she also wants to find out whether the
students of Writing I make more or fewer errors than the
students of Writing IV. Finally, the writer will look for
any lexical errors which are commonly shared by both stud-ents
of Writing I and Writing IV.
This study is based on the Error Analysis Theory. The
writer gives a vocabulary test to the students. It is a
multiple choice test in which the students has to choose the
right answer out of four choices provided. The test items
are compiled from many sources, such as books about common
errors, the students' compositions in their writing courses,
and the writer's own personal experience. In the test, the
writer includes the incorrect lexical items which are com-monly
used by the students among the other options. Then the
writer will count the errors made by the students, and
present them in tables. Later on, the data on the tables
will be analysed further to find out what lexical errors are
mostly made by the students, and also what errors are com-monly
shared by both students of Writing I and Writing IV.
The tables will also show whether Writing IV students make
fewer or more errors than Writing I students, since it will
be very useful to describe any progress made by the students
in their process of learning English.
After doing the research, she finds that students of
Writing IV mostly make fewer errors than students of Writing
I. However, they seem to repeat the same errors in several
lexical items.