Junior High School Students' Grammar Problems in Their Written Production

Abstract

This study discusses grammatical problems that appeared in junior high school students' written production. The data were taken from the participants' written production. The participants of this study were 20 Pangudi Luhur junior high school students with good grammar proficiency. Those participants were asked to create a paragraph based on topics that triggered the participants to create a paragraph using a mix of various tenses. The students' written productions were analyzed using error analysis as a method to find the most frequent errors that the students make. The analysis of the grammatical errors that found were based on the surface structure taxonomy of Dulay, Burt and Krashen (1982) where errors are categorized into verb form, preposition, article, plurality, tense, pronoun, question and word form. This study also gave a deep analysis on the reasons why those kinds of errors might appear .The result of the analysis indicates that tense, plurality, and preposition were the most frequent errors that occurred in the participants' written production. The error categorization shows what kind of errors that occurredin the participants' written production. The data analysis indicates possible reasons why such errors might appear which is compatible with Corder's (1981) theory of errors especially in grammatical errors in learning second or foreign language.