An Error Analysis
on Students’ Recount Text
By
Abdul Malik
Hakim, Annisa Febrinel Hendry, Asep Amir Hamzah, Septiyani Wafda, Wiwin Winingsih
English Education Department
Faculty of Tarbiyah and Teachers’ Training
Syarif Hidayatullah State Islamic University
chez_wizard@ymail.com
Abstract
The purpose of this paper is to know the common
mistake and error that the students’ make in conducting their own recount text.
This paper required the researchers to examine 9 writing samples out of 36
populations in 10th grade Multimedia class of SMK Yapimda, Pasar
Minggu. The researchers have known that the students have learned about the
Recount text and Simple Past Tense which becomes the main highlight. The
instrument that is used in this research is students’ recount writing and Karl
James Table. All of the errors and mistakes are identified and classified using
the James Table. The result of identification shows the common mistakes that
the students’ always make which derived those mistakes into errors because it
happens constantly in students’ writing. Those errors are verb tense, word
choice, and word order which are important in writing recount. Therefore, the
information towards the students’ errors in conducting their recount text could
help the teacher to be more specified to the students’ common errors in
teaching recount text.
1.
INTRODUCTION
Error
in English especially in writing is something that the students sometimes
couldn’t avoid. Even though these errors made by the students are bad, they can
also bring advantages to the further teaching English. Errors provide amounts
of information needed to evaluate the teachers’ method of teaching and what the
students’ haven’t gained in the language learning process. Therefore, error
analysis couldn’t be neglected in learning a foreign language.
In
this study, the writers tried to investigate the common errors that the
students make in their writing, especially in writing their own recount text.
The result of this research will become an evaluation to the teacher’s method
of teaching in the class. The writers have compiled several previous studies
that have the same method with their research. Those previous studies are
conducted as follows:
Namiko Sadoka, an assistant
of one Professor of Hiroshima University of Economics, Hiroshima, Japan has
ever been doing a research about “Error Analysis within Newspaper Reporting
Written by Japanese Secondary School Students”. The method follows James' case study (1998: 267-277). An
algorithm, which is originally proposed by Corder (1973, 1981) and established
by James (1998), is used for Error Analysis. She used the 6
stages of the procedure of error analysis. The process of error analysis is similar to a teaching
cycle, which begins with identifying, describing, explaining, evaluating and
ends in preventing the error. In the
cycle, students ideally develop their English; therefore, there is no ending.
The task of this case study is free writing and main purposes are to encourage
students to write fluently in order to get meaning across, and also to be aware
of a newspaper style. Evaluation and feedback follow these purposes. On the
whole, communication-based strategy errors are more serious than surface-errors
such as misspellings as long as the communicative purposes are not compromised.
As for feedback, avoiding the error by encouraging students to rewrite is
preferable to correcting the error. It is expected for students to develop both
form and content in the process of writing. Finally, one example exercise is
intended to be used in the classroom. As I mentioned above, this procedure is a
cycle. Therefore, if there is no improvement, we can reflect on the causes of
the errors and employ other feedback. After
she implied those stages to the samples’ writing, she found six main sources of
errors which consist of mother-tongue
influence: interlingual errors, target language causes: intralingual errors,
communication strategy-based errors, induced errors, compound and ambiguous errors
(unique),
and intelligibility.
The second previous study was
conducted by Lailatussaidah (2011), the students of Syarif Hidayatullah State
Islamic University. She conducted her paper for the purpose of fulfilling her
study at the university. She researched about students’ error in transforming
simple present, present progressive and simple past tense from affirmative into
negative and interrogative form. The research was conducted to Second Year
students of MTs Al-Khairiyah Jakarta. The objective or her study is to gain the
information about the common errors that mostly did by the students of MTs
Al-Khairiyah Jakarta in transforming simple present, present progressive and
simple past tense from affirmative into negative and interrogative form and its
reason. The method that is used in her research is descriptive qualitative
method. She only gave a written test in a form of sentence exercise about the
target tenses to the students. Soon after that, she classified their errors
into verb tense, auxiliary verb, word order, omission and punctuation. She also
interpreted the data about what kind of error that mostly students made. The
final step was she concluded the result of research. The technique of data analysis
that she used was descriptive analysis technique with the percentage form the
frequency of information and divided with the number of cases. After the
research was conducted and the data was analyzed, she found out that the
biggest error that the students made in transforming simple present, present
progressive and simple past tense from affirmative into negative and
interrogative form was in verb tense with the percentage as much as 38,12%.
Errors in auxiliary follows as the next result as much as 34,45%, errors in
word order as much as 11,77%, errors in omission as much as 11,27%, and errors
in punctuation as much as 4,37%.
MISTAKES VS ERRORS
Mistakes
and errors are two different things in Error Analysis. Mistakes are related
with the students’ performance. It usually made when the students are lacking
of attention, fatigue, carelessness, or some other aspects of performance. As
for errors, they are related with the students’ competence. It deals with the students’
use of linguistic item in a way that fluent or native speaker of the language
regards it as showing faulty or incomplete learning. Mistakes in any way could
be corrected by the students, whereas for errors happened the other way around.
Students’ couldn’t correct their own errors because their competencies haven’t
reached the level that has to be reached. Errors could be indentified when the
students’ made such constant mistakes in their spoken or written language.
Errors
can be described into different categories. The first one is based on Corder’s
theory (1973) where he classified errors in terms of the difference between the
learners’ utterance and the reconstructed version. In this way, errors divided
into four categories: omission of
some required element; addition of
some unnecessary or incorrect element; selection
of an incorrect element; and misordering
of the elements. Nevertheless, Corder himself added that this classification is
not enough to describe errors. That is why he included the linguistics level of
errors under the sub-areas of morphology, syntax, and lexicon.
2.
MATERIALS
AND METHOD
The
method that the writers used in this research follows James’ case study
(1988:267-277). James established an algorithm which was originally proposed by
Coder (1973, 1981), and the algorithm is used for Error Analysis.
The
procedure of error analysis originally has six steps. However, the writers only
used three of them in this paper. The description of the steps will be
described in the following paragraphs.
Step 1: Elicitation and
registration (data collection)
On
this step, the writers collect the data from the samples. The samples were nine
students out of 36 populations in 10th grade Multimedia class of SMK
Yapimda Pasar Minggu. The writers assumed that they have learned about recount
text and its component including simple past tense which becomes the main
highlight. The samples that the writers took are contained of three students
which have the highest scores, three students which have medium scores, and the
other three with the lowest scores according to their last test at school. They
were asked by the teacher to write a recount text about what they did in their
last weekend. There is no other instruction except the students’ were asked to
write it on their own paper and must contain at least three paragraphs. The
teacher gave the task as a twenty four hour homework so they could explore what
they would like to write on their papers. This data collection activity was
conducted from 19th up to 20th November 2012.
Step 2: Identification
After
the writers have got the data from the students, they moved to the next step of
error analysis based on Karl James’ algorithm which is identification. In this
step, the writers tried to identified the errors that have been made by the
students into several possibilities reasons of why the students made such those
errors. The writers have already known that the common mistakes the students
often made in their recount writings are on verb changes which deal with the
simple past tense, word order, and word choice. The writers tried to compare
those errors to the several possibilities that could make them made such
errors, such as their background knowledge of recount text and simple past
tense, their intensity in writing task, their life backgrounds, etc.
Step 3: Description
The last step that the writers used
from Karl James’ algorithm is description step. This step explains how the
writers are going to describe the data that have been go from the students
using Karl James’ table. The table are presented bellow this section.
LEVEL
MODIFICATION
|
Substance
|
Text
|
|
Phonology
Graphology
Spelling
Pronunciation
|
Grammar
|
Lexis
|
|
RANK:
Clause-Phrase-Word-Morpheme
CLASS:
Noun-Verb-Adjective-Adverb-Preposition-Conjunction-etc.
|
SENSE
RELATION
COLLOCATION
|
||
OMISSION
|
|||
ADDITION
|
|||
MISSECTION
|
|||
MISORDER
|
|||
The
horizontal columns show the level of the error, phonology, graphology, grammar,
lexis, text, or discourse. Vertical columns show target modification taxonomy.
It consists omission where some element of a word is omitted which should be
present, addition where some element in present which should not be there,
miselection where the wrong item has been chosen in place of the right one, and
misorder where the elements presented are correct but wrongly sequenced.
3.
RESULT
As
the data has been collected and analyzed using Karl James’ algorithm and table,
the writers found several common errors that the students have been made. Those
errors are word order, verb tense, and word choice. The writers categorized
those as errors because they see it as the students made mistakes on that part
constantly.
On
the substance level, the students only made mistakes in their writings. The all
level students made common mistakes in spelling. Misselection in substance
level is found in the word *Immadiately (Low1, line 3), *bad (Low3, line 2),
and *pm (Hi1, line 4). The writer also found on the omission section as the
student wrote *activitis instead of activities (Hi1, line 1).
As
for the text-level errors of grammaticality, the most common errors is an
omission of a sentence’s subject “I” (Hi1, line 7, 13, and 15) (Hi2, line 2)
(Med2, line 2) (Med3, line 4 and 8) (Low2, line 4), omission of verb (Hi1, line
2, 4, 5, and 19) (Hi2, line 3) (Med1, line 4) (Med3, line 4), omission of
preposition (Hi1, line 4) (Low2, line 6) (Low3, line 4, 5, and 8). The other
omission only happened because of students’ mistake because they didn’t happen
constantly. Addition sometimes happen in students’ writing (Hi3, line 7) (Low2,
line 5, 6, and 7). A verb tense misselection also often appears in the word
transformation from present tense verb into past tense which becomes a
highlight in recount text (Hi1, line 2, 13, 14, 16, 17, 18, 19, and 20) (Hi2,
line 1, 3, 4, and 5) (Hi3, line 4 and 7) (Med1, line 1, 2, 5, 7, and 8) (Med2,
line 1, 4, and 5) (Med3, line 2, 3, 5, 9, and 7) (Low1, line 5, 7, and 8)
(Low2, line 2, 3, 5, and 8) (Low3, line 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 8, and 9). The errors
in word transformation into gerund also appear in students’ writing (Hi1, line
8 and 11) (Med1, line 2) (Low3, line 2 and 4).
The
following errors are lexis-level errors which are misuse of sensory verbs like
*do much less when ‘released my’ is meant (Hi1, line 20), *show when ‘plan’ is
meant (Hi3, line 8), *was when ‘got’ is meant (Med2, line 3), *made when
‘cooked’ is meant (Low1, line 4), *smoothed when ‘tidied up’ is meant (Low1,
line 2).
From
the analysis of the sample below, the writers conclude that the errors which
are made by the students are caused by several reasons. Those reasons are
described in the following list:
a. Mother
tongue influence is one of the reasons the students made errors where they
always refer to their Bahasa Indonesia in making their English writing. They
translated Bahasa Indonesia to English literary, for example Ceritaku pada hari minggu yang lalu is
translated “My Story on Sundays ago” while it should be “My story on Last Sunday”
(Med3, line 1 and 2) (Low2, line 1 and 2).
b. Induced
errors happen in their verb tense especially in past tense. All of the students
made the same errors when it comes to verb changes from present to past. The
writers assumed that the students haven’t understood about the past tense which
becomes the main highlight in recount text, or they did not know about the
irregular verb changes because most of the errors that they made in verb
changes are from the irregular verbs.
4.
DISCUSSION
In
this study, the writers tried to analyze the errors that the students made in
their writing, especially in writing recount text. The process of error
analysis begins from asking the teacher to ask the students to make their own
recount writing based on the topic about what they had been doing in the last
long holiday. The students were asked to collect their writing a day after the
assignment was given. When the samples were collected, the writers began to
analyze those using Karl James’ algorithm (elicitation, identification, and
description) and table. From the research and the analysis that the writers
have been done, they found out that the common mistake that the students made
in writing recount text is verb tense, word order, and word choice. The reasons
of why those errors occur are mother tongue influence and induce error. This
study is meant to help the English teacher to know about the capability of
students in writing, especially in writing recount text along with its
structure. The writers also hope the teacher could know how to classified
students’ errors, and how to handle it. The writers hope the result of this
study could give inputs to teaching and learning process. As for the other
researchers who would like to do the same research as the writers did, this
study could be used as their previous study.
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