Students’ Writing Error in Parts of Speech: A Case Study of EFL Students

Abstract


INTRODUCTION
Communication skill in English is divided into four major skills including speaking, listening, writing, and reading. These four major skills are connected one to another. People cannot just master a skill and leave the rest of three major skills left behind. They must be studied and improved together as time goes on. In order to master those four skills, students must master Parts of Speech before they try to improve the skills. Specially in enhancing the productive skill of writing and speaking. Students must be able to identify each element in Parts of Speech including Noun, Pronoun, Verb, Adjective, Adverb, Preposition, Conjunction, and Interjection. Basically, all sentences in English, both of oral and written will consist of words. Words are a tool to communicate and convey an idea or opinion. Therefore, learning a language, especially English Language must start from understanding a function and grammar in arranging a sentence. Which is consists of parts of speech. According to Roziqin (2013) said the term parts of speech shows the function of a word in a sentence. Therefore, in understanding a sentence someone must understand and master the parts of speech. Chakravarty (2004) states that is in a sentence, a word may play one of eight parts. It may be either: a noun, an adverb, a pronoun, a preposition, a verb, a conjunction, an adjective, and an interjection. We use the parts of speech to build sentences. These ideas then could not be separated from the importance of learning writing skill.
The idea that learning writing is a need for students is agreeable. There are some reasons that make the skill of writing is important as what Barras (2005) says: (1) writing helps to remember, writing is an aid to remembering. By taking notes, people can make information safe and semi-permanent or even permanent so that they can access the information anytime without being afraid of being lost; (2) writing helps to think, writing could be an aid to thinking. People can make a note of useful thoughts as they come to mind, for Open Access: https://ejournal.unma.ac.id/index.php/educatio example, when they are planning or in the middle of writing a composition because thoughts could come anytime; (3) writing helps to communicate, In the past, writing was the only possible way to communicate with anyone out of earshot. Although, now there have been devices (telephone, radio, internet, etc.) that make it possible to communicate orally with people in distance, the importance of writing is still there. There is a limit in which the use of such devices is impossible, particularly when two people communicating are removed, not only, by distance, but also by time.
Writing also has importance in terms of its product that it has its specific purposes. Halliday (1985), as quoted by Nunan (1993), says that written language, the product of writing, is used for action (public signs, product labels, television and radio guides, bills, menus, telephone directories, ballot papers, computer manuals), for information (newspapers, current affairs magazines, advertisements, political pamphlets) and for entertainment (comic strips, fiction books, poetry and drama, newspaper features, film subtitles). Those mentioned above are examples of written languages, starting from the simplest (public sign) until the more complex (newspapers), which are not separable from human life nowadays and, for sure, all are done with writing skill. From this idea, the writer went into a small observation in a senior high school in order to see the students' ability in Parts of Speech mastery. In the observation, the writer asked the students to identify parts of speech in some sentences. The result of the observation was out of expectation. Some students misidentified words which were nouns to be adjectives. Some others could not identify words that they had never identified before. Some others still misidentified words which were verbs to be nouns. Some others could not say the different between preposition and adverb.
Based on the small observation contributed by the writer, it was necessary to do further research in order to find out how far exactly the students master the Parts of Speech. From the research, the writer would be able to describe the students' error in identifying Parts of Speech and from the result, a further research would be formulated to overcome the problem. The students' errors were identified and described also reason of how the error could occur can be described. This research will be carried out by analysing the students' error in writing. The analysis was based on the use of Parts of Speech in their writing. In this research the problems of the research had been formulated as follows: (1) What errors did the students make in their writing of descriptive text?; (2) What were the possible causes of error that caused the errors in the students' writing of descriptive text?

METHODS
This research was conducted in descriptive qualitative research design. This research design was suitable for this research. This research was conducted by analysing the data qualitatively and descriptively described the phenomena happened after observing the data taken from the students. Population and sample were based on the availability respondents in the location of research. The population of this research was five classes with the total students of one hundred fifty students. The sample of this research was chosen by applying the lottery technique to the total population. The sample of this research then after apllying the sampling analysis was 30 students.
The instrument that had been used in this research was instrument that support the collection of descriptive qualitative data. The instrument was essay test. The essay test consisted of one instrument with instruction, "Write a descriptive text about things around you in two paragraphs." The procedure of research in this research was started from the collecting of data, analysis of data, and finally the result of research. This research was started from collecting data by applying the essay test to the chosen sample in this research. After collecting the raw data, the data was analysed by analysing the error of parts of speech in the raw data. The next step was grouping the errors based on the kinds of error made by the students. Finally, describing how the errors occured and the possible cause of errors.

RESULTS AND DISCUSSION
The data of this research was presented from the result of the students' essay test that had been gathered in this research. The data of this research was presented in a table consisted of each part of speech written on the students' paper. The data was as follows.  It was concluded that most of the students made errors in the aspect of noun, pronoun, and adjective. Those three aspects were on the upper rank top three of the errors found on the students' essay writing. The percentage of error made by the students in total was presented in the following figure.

Figure 1. Percentage of Errors
Further, this research was focused on the analysis of the students' error based on the classification of error that adopted by this research. The classification was based on omission, addition, misformation, and misordering. it showed that the most error occurred on the aspect of misordering with the total number of errors at 151. Secondly followed by omission with the total number of errors at 107. Thirdly followed by misformation with the total number of errors at 99. Lastly was addition with the total number of errors at 98. It was concluded that most of the students made errors on the aspect of misformation. In order to make the data of this research clearer and easier to be analysed, this research presented the data in percentage form. The percentage of error was presented at the chart bellow.

Figure 2. Percentage of Errors based on Error Classification
The classified data showed that the errors found in the students writing were dominated by noun with the percentage of 22%, followed by pronoun 19%, adjective 17%, verb 14%, conjunction 14%, adverb 8%,

Percentage of Errors based on Error Classification
Omission Addition Misformation

Misordering
Open Access: https://ejournal.unma.ac.id/index.php/educatio preposition 6%, and lastly interjection 0.2 %. Based on this data, the analysis was focused on the explanation of how the errors occur on the students' writing. From the narration, this research presented the cause and possibly deliberate solution to avoid the same errors to be happened. The presented analysis from the data was the descriptive analysis of the errors made by students in their writing based on omission, addition, misordering, and misformation.

Omission
From the data gathered in the data collection, there were 23% error of omission found. The data showed that students tend to omit words of parts of speech in their writing. One of the students wrote "the restaurant located near my hometown". From the analysis, it was found out that there was an error of omission. The error of omission was located between morpheme restaurant and located. There was a lost morpheme. There should be is between morpheme restaurant and located to make the sentence complete. This error was classified at the aspect of verb in parts of speech. This kind of error was also occurred on another students' writing. As in another case, students wrote "the principal my school always to school on time". From this sample, it was found out that there were two error of omission. The first error of omission was located between morpheme principal and my. The student omitted the needed morpheme which was the morpheme of. This error was classified at the aspect of preposition in parts of speech.
The second error of omission in the sentence was located between morpheme always and to. There should be morpheme come to complete the sentence. This kind of error was classified at the aspect of verb in parts of speech. Most of other samples that made errors in omission were found did the kinds of error explained above. They were unaware about the error they made. The possible cause of this might be the problem of the students in intralingual transfer of the target language.
The findings in this study are also in line with findings in research by Putri (2013), Yalinta (2020), Abdillah (2014), and Utami (2019) which state that omission errors are the most common mistakes found in writing English. This means that students still do not know which words are needed in an English sentence. Their knowledge of their first language is one of the factors that causes this type of error. Indonesian has different rules in grammar (Asmoro, 2023).

Addition
This kind of error was happened when there was addition of morpheme in the writing of students. This error was counted as much as 22% out of the sum of the four kinds of error. This addition error is marked by the presence of an item or element that should not be present in good and correct speech or writing (Wijaya, 2017;Zalukhu & Zega, 2020). One of the sample was "my brother and my sister and my father and I always have dinner together". From this sentence, it showed that there were some errors at the aspect of addition. The first error of addition was located between morpheme brother and my. Morpheme and between those morphemes was not necessary. The student should just add a comma rather than adding another morpheme such as and. This kind of error was also classified as error at the aspect of conjunction in the aspect of parts of speech, that the conjunction was not necessarily needed.
The second error of addition that was found in the sentence above was located between sister and my. The kind of error made in this case was the same which happened with the previous error in this sentence too. The morpheme and between morpheme sister and my was not necessarily needed in this sentence. The third error of addition in this sentence or case was also at the same analysis. The reason of the occurrence of this kind of error was possibly because of the same reason as the omission error. The intralingual transfer could seriously affect the learners production of the target language. The learners often consider the language structure of their first language.

Misformation
Misformation error in this research was the error that was found in the students writing regarding to the misform of the morpheme. This misformation error often appears in writing prepositions, ordinal numbers, verbs, conjunctions, auxiliary words, letters, articles, nouns, adjectives, and adverbs (Asmoro, 2023).
Open Access: https://ejournal.unma.ac.id/index.php/educatio One of the cases that was found in this research was "The car of my father was always clean and shined". From this sentence there was an error of misformation which located between morpheme father and always which was the morpheme was. The form of the morpheme was incorrect.
Based on the type of text which was descriptive text and the adverb of frequency in the sentence which was always, morpheme was should be in the form of simple present tense. The correct one should be is. The same thing also happened to morpheme shined at the sentence. The morpheme should transform to shine. Another sample was also analysed and found out that there was error of misformation. It was found out in the sentence "Ice tea is my favourite drink". From this sentence, it was found out that the error of misformation was at the morpheme ice. The morpheme was not act as noun in parts of speech. It was act as adjective. For that reason, the morpheme was then analysed as error of misformation. It should be written iced.

Misordering
The error in the aspect of misordering was happened from the writing of students which not well organized based on its grammar. In this research, students often did this kind of error which came to conclusion that most of the students did not master the grammar of their target language which was the grammar of English. Misordering error was one of the reasons of why such idea come to conclusion. This misordering error also occurs due to the influence of students' knowledge of their first language, namely Indonesian (Abdillah, 2014;Kasenda et al, 2019) One of the sample that was taken in this research wrote "My mother beloved always give me motivation good". From this case, it was found out that there were errors in misordering. The sentence was not well organized based on the suitable grammar of the target language. The sentence followed the source language grammar and caused error in misordering. The error was found at the placement of morpheme beloved. An adjective should be placed in front or before a noun. This rule of parts of speech was not well implemented in the sentence. The writing must be "my beloved mother". Another misordering error was also found in the same sentence. It was located at "good". The reason of why this became an error in misordering was also the same as the previous one. The writing should be "good motivation".

CONCLUSION
The conclusion of this research was purposed to answer the research problems in this research. Based on the result of this research, it can be concluded that the students made errors in all four aspects of analysis in error analysis which were omission, addition, misformation, and misordering. The classified data showed that the errors found in the students writing were dominated by noun with the percentage of 22%, followed by pronoun 19%, adjective 17%, verb 14%, conjunction 14%, adverb 8%, preposition 6%, and lastly interjection 0.2 %. The data then analysed by considering the analysis in error analysis and found out that 33% error in misordering, 23% error in omission, 22% error in misformation, and 22% error in addition.
From the finding, this research showed that error which appear the most was dominated by misordering error and noun in the aspect of parts of speech. The possible cause of how the errors could happened was because of the influence of intralingual transfer. Students cannot differentiate between their experience in using grammar of source language and target language. Thus, the product of target language that provided by the students met errors.
The suggestion that could be offered from this research was that the students need to practice and learn more of how the grammar of both source and target language works. In the other hand, teacher need to work harder to make sure that the students aware of the errors made by the students and provide more practice to improve the students' knowledge and understanding of how the grammar of source language and target language worked. These suggestions hopefully could give better result for the students in producing their target language.