ERROR ANALYSIS OF THE STUDENTS’ ENGLISH WRITTEN DESCRIPTIVE TEXT

Making errors is a natural process of learning. Writing as a productive skill is important for students to express their ideas. However, students conducted errors in the productive skills. Therefore, this study is intended to find out types of errors made by students in written English. This study employed the qualitative method where the Error Analysis was implemented. The subject of this study is students in first grade of SMAN 1 Abdya and the object of this study were the errors found in written English. The population of this research was all of students in first grade which consists of 208 students from all study programs where 25 % of the populations were taken as the sample. To collect the data, written tests were conducted. The written test shows the percentage of writing errors, including omission errors, which is 58.38%, misformation errors with a total of 16.48%, misordering error 13.89%, and addition of 11.26%. The errors were found when students omitted 'to be' as main verb. Second, students tend to add 'to' after modal auxiliaries such as 'can' or 'will'. Third, misformation errors happened when students could not form the verb correctly. Last, the misordering errors were produced when students put words randomly. Consequently, it was discovered that the errors made by students were impacted by their native language, and this is the interlanguage move.


INTRODUCTION
Language learning involves committing errors. Errors seem to be a natural process of learning. In the past, language teachers considered errors committed by their students as something undesirable which they diligently sought to prevent from occurring. However, it is believed that writing is very difficult, and thus the learners need to have a comprehensive understanding, cognitive analysis, and linguistics synthesis to pattern the language to be able to convey ideas, messages, and feeling to the listeners or readers through writings (Tan, 2007).
In addition, another study by Aziz, Fitriani and Amalina (2020), which investigated the types of linguistic errors produced by students by adopting the notions of Error Analysis (EA) and the Surface Strategy Taxonomy as the theoretical framework shows that Overall, 122 (63%) cases out of 195 cases were categorized under the omission type of errors. The number marker, verb-tense, article, preposition, subject-verb agreement, and pronoun were the category of frequent errors made by students respectively. These were followed by addition (18%), misformation (15%), and misordering (5%). Significance to the source of errors, intralingual transfer turned out to be the main reason that triggers the error in the students' writings.
Therefore, this study was intended to investigate students' errors on the genre of descriptive text which is used the Surface Strategy Taxonomy as the suitable theory to be the fundamental of this research. The previous researches show one skill in each study of error analysis. This study was carried out to analyze students' writing skills and especially writing errors made by students. It is important for the researcher to analyze their errors and diagnose the difficulties they experience in the classroom so that it can be an input for teachers to improve their students' writing quality. Error analysis is an activity to identify, classify and interpret or describe the errors made by a person in writing and is carried out to obtain information on common difficulties faced by students in writing English sentences (Choironi, Sukirlan, & Suparman, 2017).
Then, the important issue in this research is the analysis of error writing skills. It is very important to know the extent of student achievement in learning writing skills. In addition, the Surface Strategy Taxonomy (SST) is rarely used by previous researchers, such as the existing Surface Strategy Taxonomy (SST) does not look in detail at the sections of omission, addition, misformation, and misordering. In addition, the writer wants to deepen the existing research by analyzing in more detail the mistakes made by students in writing skills.

LITERATURE REVIEW
Writing in first language is a complex process, and of course, it may be more complicated to write in a foreign language. Many researchers have tried to identify the common errors made by students in writing in second language. A better understanding of errors and sources of errors can help teachers identify students' difficulties in learning that language. Ramli, Suhartono and Novita (2013) noted that writing is a way to express feelings, ideas, arguments, willingness, and thoughts in the form of words in sentences. It means that students should be able to express their ideas in written form as a result of their understanding of the text they read. For that reason, writing is an important skill to be taught to students. Even though writing is stated important as explained above, it is still a matter in the process of learning a foreign language.
In this study, the researcher analyzed the students' errors in writing a descriptive text. Writing is a formal skill and error analysis is also a formal process to revise and improve writing skills. Through error analysis both teachers and students are able to find errors due to their mother tongue's interferences in the context of phonology, morphology, syntax, lexical, and culture. In addition, Sirait (2012) believes that by noticing the writing errors done by the students, the teachers can take them as advantages for the students themselves, such as: (a) a device which the learner uses in order to learn, (b) to fully grasp and understand the nature of errors, and (c) instead of just being able to recognize errors, the learners are now able to explain the rules and correct the errors.
The Surface Strategy Taxonomy (SST) is a descriptive taxonomy proposed by Dulay, Burt and Krashen (1982). According to Dulay et al. (1982, as cited in Kafipour & Khojasteh, 2012, the taxonomy highlights the ways the surface structures are altered by learners who may omit necessary items or add unnecessary one; they may misformatted items or misorder them (Dulay et al., 1982, p. 150). Surface strategy taxonomy discusses the analysis of errors based on the comparison between the altered structures of the target language utterances produced by an L2 learner and other types of language constructions (Kafipour & Khojasteh, 2012). For example, the errors made by the native English children who are in the process of acquiring the language are used as comparative data to those of the Italian EFL learner defiant productions in order to classify the errors (Aziz et al., 2020).

RESEARCH METHODOLOGY
The research method of this study is qualitative in nature. Ary, Jacobs, Razavieh and Sorensen (2006) explain that qualitative study finds out a phenomenon, a process, or a particular point of view from the perspective of those involved. In brief, the purpose of this study is to find out the students' errors produced in their speaking and writing. Specifically, in this current study, the researcher uses Error Analysis (EA). In conducting this research, the data was taken from the transcripts of senior high school students class 1 (grade X) which were recorded directly on 16-23 October 2020.

Research Participants
The subjects of this study were the students in first grade of SMAN 1 Aceh Barat Daya and the object of this study was the errors found in spoken and written English. The population of this research was all students in first grade which consists of 208 students from all study programs. The sample was the students in first grade chosen randomly in which there were no criteria in selecting the participant. Tests were used to collect the data. The form of the tests was speaking and writing test. In this study, the researcher selected the samples by doing the lottery method. Since the lottery method is quite burdensome if it is performed by hand, the lottery method is calculated by using Microsoft Excel in order to save time, which is more effective and efficient. Because individuals who make up the subset of the larger group are chosen at simple random, each individual in the large population set has the same probability of being selected. This creates, in most cases, a balanced subset that carries the greatest potential for representing the larger group as a whole, free from any bias (Hayes, 2020).

Research Instrument
The research instruments in this study were oral and written tests. Oral tests were carried out through short conversations recorded with a tape recorder. While the written test was conducted through writing some sentences and/or expressions and/or statements and/or short paragraphs.

Technique of Data Collection
The test employed in this study included writing tests. Arikunto (2002, p. 150) says that a test can be described as a series of questions or other instruments which are used to measure the intervals of group's skill, knowledge, intelligence, capability, or talent. Here, the researcher used tests as the research instrument. The tests were given to find out and to identify the errors made by students in writing.
The writing test was conducted three days right after the 3 classes end around 19 to 23 October 2020. The writer took the data in three different classes to direct the students to take the writing test. The students were asked to compose a paragraph describing themselves and their family in descriptive genre. The time duration given to the students is about 45 minutes per student in each class and a minimum of 150 words is required. So there were 7.800 words collected from 150 words multiply 52 students.

Technique of Data Analysis
The analysis of the written data uses the identification of errors as proposed by Dulay et al. (1982). However, to make it more detailed, the researcher analyzed the causes of errors based on the two basic rules or criteria; language transfer and context of learning (Aziz et al., 2020). In calculating the number of errors and the frequency of errors, Walizer and Wiener's (1990) statistical calculation was employed to display the error percentage: P f/N×100% where P is the percentage of error. F is the frequency of error. N is the total number of samples.

Results
This section is intended to answer the research question which is "what types of errors do students likely make in the written test.?" In this type of test, the students were asked to compose a short text that described themselves. The variables include their origins, hobbies, families, best friends, and parents' jobs. The overall data can be seen in Figure 1 below.

Figure 1. Percentage of errors in written test.
The results found that the highest percentage of errors in the written test is omission errors, which is 58.38%. This value is considered very dominant compared to other variables which only reach less than the range of 20%. Misformation error came in second with a total of 16.48%, followed by misordering error of 13.89% and addition of 11.26%. To be able to understand each item from Figure 1, the writer explains it through several sub-chapters below.

Omissions found in students' written test
The results of the written test show that grade X students tend to make omission errors in sentences they write. Based on Figure 2 below, it is clear that only two students did not make omission errors in writing descriptive paragraphs while 50 other students did. Six students did it three times, six students did it twice, while the other students showed this error 4-8 times. In the event, there was one student who did it 10 times. As previously explained, omission errors tend to be repeated by students. In order to obtain a more detailed picture, Table 1 and several subsections below are provided to represent the errors made by students in the written test. Table 1 below shows the tendency of student omission. The sample is tabulated based on the results of the student's written test with code 49. There are 12 sentences produced from her short paragraph. The data shows that the student omitted many aspects including 'to be' as the main verb or as the auxiliary verb, determiner, and disagreement on subject-verb. My fav food all western food and I cook myself.

Omission
My fav food is all western food and food that I cook by myself.  The first example is sentence number 3, "I from Kampung Rawa." The sentence shows that the student omitted to be 'am' to agree with the subject 'I'. The sentence should be "I am from Kampung Rawa." The next error is shown in sentence number 4, "My age 16" which should be "My age is 16" or "I am 16 years old".

Addition found in students' written test
The total percentage of addition errors made by students in writing tests is 11.26%. This shows that even though the test is carried out in writing, the accuracy, ability, and understanding of students towards the descriptive text is still in doubt. The figure above shows that the most addition errors made was five times by student 11, student 12 did it four times, while others did it three times, twice, once and some did not at all. A detailed explanation is given through the examples below.  Table 2 shows some examples of addition errors made by students. In addition errors, students tend to add 'to' to modal auxiliaries such as 'can' or 'will'. An example is shown in sentence 10, "He can to swim, draw, making toys." The sentence should not need 'to' in front of 'can'.

Misformation found in students' written test
The misformation was found in the result of the written test with a total of 16.48%. It shows that students still have difficulty in determining or using the right words in writing self-description. For more details, it can be seen in Figure 4 below. The figure above shows the frequency of the misformation done by each student. Student no 2 practiced misformation six times with the most misformation errors and was followed by student number 3 who did it five times compared to other students. Even so, most students did not do it in written test. In fact, during the test, students tend to find it difficult to start writing. It can be seen that students have difficulty finding the right words to express their meaning by using the target language, English. Furthermore, examples of this type of error are shown in Table 3 below.   Based on the example presented in the table above, students with code 22 make a misfromation error on subject-verb agreement. For example, in the sentence "He study in university" where 'he' as the subject should be agreed with 'study' as the main verb so that it becomes 'studies'. It is the same with the sentence "He live in Banda Aceh" where 'live' should be 'lives' because the subject is the third male person.

Misordering found in students' written test
Misordering error is the last variable reported for the results of this study. The total percentage of misordering made by students while writing short paragraphs was 13.89%. It means that this type of error practiced by students is relatively small. The range of errors carried out by the students was one to three times in their paragraph.   6  8  10  12  14  16  18  20  22  24  26  28  30  32  34  36  38  40  42  44  46  48  50  52 Several examples from one student's writing with code 41 are displayed in Table 4 to find out the errors made by the student. The student arranged words randomly. As in sentence number 13, the student translated their thoughts literally from Indonesian to English. More details are presented in the next paragraph. Sentence number 13, "School my sister is in Serambi Mekkah University" indicates this sentence has a misorder. However, it produces a neat and orderly meaning when translated into Indonesian, "my sister's school is at Serambi Mekkah University." Or "My sister's school is in Serambi Mekkah University" which is comprehensible. To understand and provide conclusions based on the findings of the research, the writer would like to discuss them in the next sub-chapter.
In recognizing errors, the writer must know why the students make errors. As we realize that the students start learning a language from their first language, Acehnese language/Jamee language (L1), then, the subsequent language, Indonesian Language (L2), lastly the foreign language, English (L3). Most of the students speak Acehnese at home. While at school, they communicate in Indonesian language.

Discussions
In this pandemic circumstance where students infrequently go to class, they do not speak English at all, aside from when the teacher requests the students to practice. Indeed, they face countless troubles in talking in English regardless of the topic. In accordance with this, Dulay et al. (1982) express that there are some significant sources that cause the student's error, which are: interlingual error, intralingual error, and context of learning.
Moreover, the data shows that the error type in both the spoken and written test results has the same ranking order although different values. It shows the understanding of students in describing themselves both orally and in writing. Grammatical errors are the main issues based on the findings of this study.
Omission error was the most predominant mistake found in this examination. After dissecting the information, it was discovered that blunders of omission can be identified into a few classes, which are omissions of 'be' as main verb, auxiliary verb, prepositions, articles, inflections, and subjects. For further detailed explanations, the following paragraphs are provided.
First of all, it was found that omission error was the highest range of blunders in both oral and written tests because the students omitted the verb 'is/am/are' when they spoke and composed paragraphs. In this case, the errors are caused by intra-lingual because the students were confused about the rule of using 'to be' which was affected by students' negative transfer. It is reflected in transcript code 3/ (Q4) "Football my hobby". The student omitted 'to be' in the sentence which has important grammatical aspect. However, the omission errors of linking verb are derived from the negative transfer of the L1 rule. The Indonesian speaker made simple generalization about the meaning of copula be is 'adalah', literally means 'to be'. This outcome is by all accounts reliable with other researches by Saad and Sawalmeh (2014) and Safrida and Kasim (2016).
According to James (1998), exploiting redundancy means omitting grammatical features that do not contribute to the meaning of an utterance. Brown (2001) as cited in Ruminar (2018) stated that it was the students' communication strategies that make the interlocutor understand their message, but sometimes these techniques can be a source of error. The students used word coinage, false cognate, and fabricated pattern as their communication strategies which became their sources of errors.
Second, the students tend to miss the auxiliary 'do' in the negative sentence. As a student with code 6/Q7 said: "No I not have sibling." The finding of this present study is in line with the study about simple present errors in speech events conducted by Simbolon (2015, as cited in Ruminar, 2018. The result shows that Indonesian students mostly did overgeneralization to produce simple present tense utterances, for example in forming interrogative sentences "What do you reading now?". It showed that Indonesian students have trouble in differentiating the use of auxiliary verb in interrogative sentences for different types of tenses. Third, some students omitted several prepositions in their utterances and sentences. In English, there are many prepositions that have different functions. Therefore, an EFL learner should pay attention to the use of prepositions. For example, student code 24/ (Q5) "I playing football afternoon with my friends, Wandi and David." Ruminar (2018) states that the problem of preposition is quite complex for Indonesian speakers since Indonesian does not have preposition-paired like in English. One reason accounting for this point is that prepositions have many different meanings and uses in different contexts. This case is consistent with Gass and Selinker (2001) who confirmed that the difference in the structure of language makes it problematic when it is transformed into a foreign language. This finding is supported by the previous studies conducted by Ting, Mahadhir and Chang (2010) and Hojati (2013). They also found that preposition is a problem for EFL learners. This kind of error is considered as intra-lingual interference because of the complexity of the use of prepositions in English.
Fourth, the data shows that the students omitted all kinds of articles when they answered the question. As shown by a student with code 46/ (Q8) "My father farmer and mother housewife." The student omitted the indefinite article a. The correct sentence is "My father is a farmer and my mother is a housewife." As noted by Safrida and Kasim (2016), there are two types of articles in English language, namely definite (the) and indefinite article (a/an). The definite article refers to the specific nouns and noun that has been said previously while the indefinite article is used for general nouns and noun that has not been said in a prior time.
The fifth case is verbs inflection of present tense marker where the students did not use the correct verb form in simple present tense. The subject did not agree with its verb. Student code 13/ (Q6) wrote "He play football with me." The student missed-s in the word "play" instead of "plays" to indicate simple present tense. The cause of those errors is considered as intra-lingual errors since the students did not master completely the target language. According to Dulay et al. (1982), missing the past tense marker is a type of intra-lingual error. This case is in line with Safrida and Kasim (2016) where they found in their study that the students often missed the verb inflection -s/-es when they talk about singular verb in present tense and in plural nouns, and omit linking verb in present tense. According to Danurwindo (2014), the omission errors can be caused by the minimum knowledge about the right structure in English. Therefore, the writer considered the cause of this error is intra-lingual.
Sixth, the students also omitted plurality markers such as made by student code 24/ (Q6) "Actually I have many friend." Such error is classified into inter-lingual interference because there are no plural nouns in Bahasa Indonesia. This kind of error was also committed by EFL students in Vietnam (Linh, 2013), Malaysia (Saad & Sawalmeh, 2014), and Saudi Arabia (Alahmadi, 2014). Interlingual Transfer is caused by the impedance of the student's primary language or mother tongue. They mostly transfer the structure of their first language into a foreign language. It implies that language learners utilize the structure of their first language in the target language (Richards, as cited in Sari, 2016). While on the other hand, the intralingual transfer alludes to things created by the student who does not mirror the structure of the native language but speculation of the target language. It is brought about by the negative exchange between the components in the target language itself. If the learners have obtained the new framework, increasingly more intralingual exchange is shown.
The second type is misformation errors committed by students in auxiliaries, prepositions, pronouns, and articles. An example of this type of error is practiced by student 1/ (Q5) who used the preposition "in" for the "weekend" time statement. In addition, an error found in the use of auxiliaries aims to pluralize the word "hobby" in code 2 / (Q4),"My hobby is reading and swimming" where the word "hobby" should be changed to the plural form "hobbies" and the main verb "to be" should follow the subject becomes "are". Misformation error happens when the students are unable to create the correct structure or morpheme in a sentence.
The misformation mistakes can be induced by the varieties in English syntactic structures. Brown (2001) declared that whenever students have started to gain portions of the new framework, increasingly, more speculation inside the target language is shown. The result of this present study is consistent with the previous research conducted by Ting et al. (2010) who examined the grammatical errors in spoken English of Malaysian university students who are less proficient in English and by Saad and Sawalmeh (2014) who conducted Error Analysis in role-play presentations among less proficient L2 Malaysian Learners. They showed that the students changed the target language structure by doing misformation.
The third type of error is misordering errors found in the result of this study. There are some phrases in the students' utterances arranged incorrectly. For example (Q2), "Anggun people call me" where it should be "People call me Anggun." The example shows that students tend to place objects that should be at the end of a sentence on the subject at the beginning of the sentence. This finding supports the idea of Mustafa, Kirana and Bahri Ys (2016) who stated that misordering errors are mostly committed by beginner learners. However, it was found that the misordering errors in this study were also caused by inter-lingual interference. As stated by Safrida and Kasim (2016) that there were only a very few words ordered by following the rule of students' native language, Bahasa Indonesia, for example, military academy. The pattern of noun phrase in English is adj+noun, but the words were ordered according to the L1 structure. Otherwise, the misordering errors which were caused by intra-lingual interference have bigger number.
These kinds of error were also found in the previous studies cone by Ruminar (2018) who concluded that the minimum knowledge about the pattern, such as structure in language also caused the students' error. Due to the lack of knowledge about the structure, the students may use the structure without paying attention to the correct rule.
In her study, Ruminar (2018) found that the least grammatical error made by the high and low proficient learners is the error of misordering which reaches 6% of the total of errors. The most frequent error in misordering is the sequence of adjectives that describe the noun, for example, "there are two color variant." Dulay et al. (1982, as cited in James, 1998 explained that misordering is often the result of learners carrying out word-to-word translations of native language surface structure when producing utterances in the target language. The last one, in the classification of errors made by students in the oral test, shows that students also produced addition errors. It was found that the errors of addition included the addition of preposition, auxiliary, conjunction, verb, redundancy, and unnecessary words. Many unnecessary auxiliary verbs were added to the students' writing. Student code 2/(Q7) made an addition error in a simple present tense sentence, which is the addition of an auxiliary "do" in the positive sentence, "I do have three brothers" where there should be no "do" needed in it. Likewise for student 17 / (Q6), "He does help me always", auxiliary "does" is not needed because the subject already agrees with the verb in the simple present condition.
In line with this, Safrida and Kasim (2016) found in their study that some additions were done by the university students in the speaking test. The study found that the students added an unnecessary auxiliary be in their sentences, conjunction (that), and double verbs. Dulay et al. (1982) acknowledged that this manifestation of error is the result of "too faithful" use of certain rules. In conclusion, the result of this study shows that the causes of students' errors in their speaking performance are both intra-lingual and inter-lingual interference. Richards (1974, as cited in Ma'mun, 2016 sees that impedance between the bilingual's dialects is for the most part on the beneficial as opposed to the open side. It is significant that students realize how to distinguish a blunder to avoid it in the future. In the field of error analysis, it has been perceived that the idea of mistakes involves the presence of different purposes behind the error. Ferris andRoberts (2001, as cited in Afifuddin, 2016) stated that there are few classifications of grammatical errors that happen in works, they are: 1) action words: Tense, structure, and subject-action word understanding, 2) things: Thing endings (plural and possessive), 3) articles/determiners mistakes, and 4) errors in sentence/statement limits: Word request, run-on, and frragments. Besides, comparable to estimation affectivity of error analysis, Şanal (2007) clarifies that the examiner must fully examine the instrument that triggers each sort of error. The source of errors could be interlanguage or intralanguage transfers (Richards, as cited in Chelli, 2014).
The initial stage of language learning is usually marked by interlingual transfer, namely the transfer of elements of the first language or mother tongue into the second language or the language being studied by students. If the students of a foreign language commit a few errors in the objective language caused by the impact of their primary language or mother tongue, that is called interlingual transfer. Chelli (2014) characterizes interlingual transfer as similar to the aftereffect of language transfer, which is caused by learner's first language. Errors from interlingual transfer may happen at various levels, for example, transfer of phonological, morphological, grammatical, and lexical-semantic elements of the native language into the target language.
Larsen-Freeman and Long (2014) further characterize errors from interlanguage move as a continuum between the main language and the target language along which all students arrange. A model gave by Altunkaya (1999) that any Turkish speakers learning English may state, "Ahmet Fatma ile evlendi" in their native language, and they may apply their old propensity to the objective language. The outcome would be "Ahmet married with Fatma ", which is not suitable in English language.

CONCLUSION AND SUGGESTIONS
This study has described the errors made by students in writing. The result in the written test shows that the rank of percentage of errors in the written test is the same as the oral test, including omission errors, 58.38%, misformation error with a total of 16.48%, misordering error 13.89%, and addition of 11.26%. To explain the causes of errors, the writer begins with the omission which it was found that the student omitted 'to be' as the main verb or as the auxiliary verb, determiner, and disagreement on subject-verb. Second, students tend to add 'to' after the modal auxiliaries such as 'can' or 'will'. Third, misformation errors happened when students could not form the verb correctly. Last, the misordering errors were produced when the students put words randomly. Some students translated the Indonesian language into English.
In this investigation, the researcher found that a few students did not think about the utilization of tenses. They utilized the previous type of action word to communicate present occasions or conditions. Furthermore, the mistakes were also identified with misordering. It was discovered that the errors were identified with misordering and made by the students were the point at which they endeavored to structure a thing as the modifier for the other thing. These mistakes were portrayed by the incorrect situation of the set of morphemes in an expression. In this examination, mistakes of misordering were found in word requests. It is possible to reason that the students made the errors in a wide range of mistakes.
The researcher would like to recommend several parties. Firstly, English teachers should be the role model and guide students to be successful in writing English. The teachers should respect the students' errors and provide guidance to the students in teaching and learning process. They should discuss with their students how to identify and correct their errors in writing. An impressive strategy in teaching speaking and writing is expected to be carried out to attract more attention from the students so that they are engaged in the English learning activity.
Secondly, the students are hoped to pay more attention to the teachers during the process of learning English whether it is online or offline class. The higher motivation the students have in learning English, the better they understand the lesson. Lastly, for future researchers, it is recommended to investigate the errors made by the students profoundly especially in the productive skills: Speaking and writing. The analysis may also broaden from other points of view and approaches.