Please take a moment to complete this survey below
Library's collection Library's IT development CancelThis study about error types is conducted particularly to focus on the types
of grammatical errors and surface changes that occur in English compositions.
The importance of investigating error types is to show the correct grammatical
rules, which might result in a good writing. The data were taken from fifteen
writing compositions written by eleven high-level students of EF English First in
Plaza Surabaya, ranging from level 13 up to 16. By discovering the students?
errors in writing their compositions, the writer attempts to find out the types of
errors based on linguistic categories and surface strategies; besides revealing the
committed type of errors along with the frequency of each occurrence. The errors
collected are classified according to the linguistic category proposed by Burt and
Kiparsky (1972). In addition, she employs the theories written by Dulay, Burt and
Krashen (1982) namely Surface Strategy Taxonomy for the data explanation. The
results of the analysis show that the noun phrase errors gain the highest
percentage, while sentential complement errors get the lowest percentage in the
data. It is significant to note that verb phrase errors also take a dominant
percentage in the compositions. The findings above might suggest that most EF
students have difficulties in the application of English grammar, whereas they
seem to be able to use the rule of sentential complement in writing a composition.
In addition, the highest percentage of surface strategies goes to misformation
errors and the least error belongs to misordering ones. The findings show that the
students do not know the application of a certain rule so they might misform the
forms. In short, based on the research that the writer has done, it turns out that
English proficiency levels do not guarantee one?s mastery of English grammar.