ABSTRACT

The objectives of the research are: (1) to describe the types of grammatical error produced by the students in their speech; (2) to investigate the causes of grammatical error in the students’ speech ; (3) to describe the percentage of the grammatical error made by the students.

The method used in this research was descriptive study using naturalistic inquiry to describe the students’ grammatical error on their speaking. The research was conducted at EF English First Solo Course from June till July in the academic year 2015/ 2016. The data were collected using oral test and observation.  In analyzing the data, the writer used interactive model of analysis which includes reducing data, displaying data, verifying data and drawing conclusions.

The research findings show three important points. First, there are four types of errors made by the students: omission, addition, misformation, and misordering errors. Second, result shows that the highest errors students made is related to the use of articles (             ), the use of auxiliaries (0.152%), the modals (0.120%), the use of prepositions (0.087%), the noun form (0.087),the word order (0.043%), and tenses (0.022%). While the remaining errors are the ill-formed sentences which need to be reconstructed because of the incorrect translation from the students’ mother tongue (Indonesian) to English. Third, the causes of the students’ errors are the interference of their mother tounge (interlingual transfer), the negative transfer from English grammar structures (intralingual transfer), and the students’ learning process (context of learning).

Keywords: descriptive study, grammatical error analysis, speaking