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Grammatical Errors in English Informal Essays by The Sixth Semester of English Literature Students

ARTICLE HISTORY Published March 27th 2021


Introduction
Language is a medium of communication to acquire the information (Rahman & Letlora, 2018). The language is a communication tool to express the idea and feeling to those invited to talk. The transmission and reception of thought and feeling arisen during the communication process needs language to endorse the effectiveness (Suherman, 2018). As we know, language communication began when people thought of something that was in their minds. People tried to express it through their mouth by using words, phrases, and sentences. On the other hand, interlocutors tried to understand other's speech so that their communication runs smoothly.
English as an international language has become the most widely studied in the world (Riski, et al., 2018;Weda, et al., 2021). Learning English as a foreign language poses a challenging aspect for students and lecturers, particularly in Indonesia (Rahman, 2018). In the language process, English in particular, we must know some language skills. There were at least four skills that we had to master. They were listening, speaking, reading, and writing. Not only English but also other foreign languages needed these skills. Without these skills, the human would never be able to communicate with each other. These four skills were the main tools when we expressed something that we meant it.
However, those skills could be classified into two characteristics: receptive and productive skills. Receptive skills were listening and reading skills, which students required to know the language, both verbal and written. It aims to understand pronunciation, master audio listening practice, and find new vocabulary, whereas productive skills were taken by someone to produce languages such as speaking and writing skills. It was usually more difficult than other skills because a person must work both oral and significantly in writing.
Writing was one of the language skill for communicating with each other (Rahman, Abbas, & Hasyim, 2019). One form of informal writing was usually mild, personal impression and development sentences were free and diverse so that information could be distributed to the reader by writing an informal essay. In writing English informal essay, it was usually rather complicated because we had to understand essay components and how to make a sentence well and correctly, so readers could be interested in our writing.
As an element of language, Grammar has role in constructing sentence and always control the use of language (Farisatma, Nasmilah, & Rahman, 2017). The main thing that must be considered in writing was the use of grammar. In using grammar, we often saw several errors and mistakes made by every student, both intentional and unintentional. For instance, when students made mistakes about grammar knowledge but often did it accidentally, they were usually called mistakes. Suppose they did without having a strong theory, then it was called error. They could not avoid error because it was a learning process. It happened because their mother tongue influenced them. Indonesian and English grammar had significant differences in expressing ideas, especially writing. So, they needed much time to master the target language well. Amelia (2013) had conducted research entitled "An Analysis of Grammatical Errors in Academic Writing Essays of English Department Students in Diponegoro University". From her analyzed data, she found 238 grammatical errors in 122 sentences, 238 words in 15 essays-the most dominant errors found in the use of verbs. The conclusion was that the most dominant errors were in the use of verbs.
Husnaini (2016) conducted research entitled "Error Analysis of English Written Essays of Higher EFL Learners: A Case Study of PGRI University". She found that sample was taken from essays made by 34 students. The most common errors were subject-verb agreement, spelling, assistive verb, word order, the last was passive voice error. As a conclusion results of these research errors that students often made.

Akbar (2019) conducted "Error Analysis of The Essays Written by English Department Students of Halu Oleo
University", this result showed that grammatical error types in students' essays were inflexion noun, verb, verb-subjectagreement, article, pronoun, spelling, singular-plural form, capitalization and preposition. It could be concluded that students had not matered using a noun, verb inflection related to conjugation, and students were not familiar with this form because English is still foreign.
J. Richards & Schmidt (2010) argued that human communication systems through structured voice regulation or written representation form a larger unit, e.g., morpheme word and sentence, even though the communication activities could be carried out tools other than the language in principle, human communicated using language. The language was always in the form of text. Coghill & Stacy (2003) defined that grammar of language was rules set that govern it was structure. Grammar was arranged to form meaningful units. It could be concluded that grammar was a language structure description and how to combine linguistics units such as words and phrases to produce sentences in the language. Mourtaga (2004) showed that errors and mistakes differed from each other because errors could not be corrected by themselves and caused by a lack of learner knowledge about the target language. In contrast, mistakes could be fixed. Most people thought that error and mistake were the exact synonyms even though the two words had different meanings. According to Yuksel (2007), an error was not the result of deficiencies. They could be considered by a slip of the tongue, fatigue, carelessness, or other performance aspects both in writing and speaking. Alice & Anna (2006) explained that an essay was a paper that had a long paragraph because humans' essays were too complicated to be discussed in one section.
This research aims at describing grammatical error types in informal English essays were made by the sixth semester of English Literature students in Makassar Islamic University and finding the causes of grammatical error in informal English essays were made by the sixth semester of English Literature students in Makassar Islamic University.

Method
In conducting this research, the researcher conducted the study by using descriptive qualitative. Gay (2006) explained that qualitative research spent time with participants in the research setting. The researcher examined students' essays and interviewed them during the research process. This research object was the sixth semester of English Literature students in Makassar Islamic University in Jalan Perintis Kemerdekaan, Makassar, South Sulawesi for approximately two months. It had been from June to July 2020. The researcher used participant observation and an open-question interview. In managing data, the researcher conducted the following procedure; (1) researcher met with writing lecturer to ask permission to research four times meetings, (2) researcher explained to students about what they did in research, (3) researcher examined learners to make essays of at least three paragraphs with some themes, (4) from these themes, learners chose a theme to write an essay. After that researcher took the learners' essays to be corrected, and (4) after understanding the result of the students' essays, the researcher interviewed to determine the cause of the grammatical errors they had done by recorded. The data analysis used several techniques; (1) the researcher indicated students' errors, (2) evaluated the students' errors by giving corrections, (3) analyzed the result of students' interviews to find out error causes and types, and (4) after that researcher discussed grammatical error types and causes in the sixth semester of English Literature in Makassar Islamic University.

Types of Error
In this research, the researcher only focused on the second type of error called surface strategies' taxonomy. There were four taxonomic categories of surface strategies proposed by Dulay, Heidi, Marine, Burt, & Stephen (1982) Those are omission, addition, misformation and misordering. It would be explained much further below.

a. Omission
The researcher found 52 omission errors, and those were: 29 errors in the omission of the auxiliary verb, three errors in the omission of the ordinary verb, six errors in the omission of the noun, eight errors in the omission of plural, two errors in the omission of gerund and four errors in the omission of preposition omission errors. The researcher used the typical statistic formula to draw each error percentage and then put it below. The table showed frequency grammatical errors, and then the bar chart illustrated the percentage of errors done by the sixth semester of English Literature students in Makassar Islamic University. Overall, the most common type of omission error made by the sixth semester of English Literature students was the omission of auxiliary verb.

b. Addition
These errors were characterized by items that did not have to appear in well-formed speech. It meant that students eliminated elements that they considered excessive, but they also added extreme elements. There were three additional types, and those are double marking, regularization, and simple Addition. The researcher used the standard statistic formula to draw each error percentage and then put it below. The table above described three omission errors that the sixth semester of English Literature Students in Makassar Islamic University. The highest was regularization consisted of 51 errors or 54.83%. Then the second highest was a simple addition. It consisted of 30 errors or 32.25%. The last one, double marking, was consisted of 12 errors or 12.90%. Moreover, it was the lowest with three types of addition. The most significant type of Addition error made by the sixth semester of English Literature students was regularization, and then the lowest was double marking.

c. Misformation
Misformation error is characterized by using incorrect morpheme or structure. This correct understanding could cause misinterpretation. The analysis results of the grammatical error utterances found were provided in the following table. The two data showed based on the types of the error made by the sixth semester of English Literature Students in Makassar Islamic University. The bar chart demonstrated the percentage of errors, and the table indicated the frequency of grammatical errors. The main point to note was that there were 210 types of error produced in learners' questioners and essays writing: Omission which consisted of 52 errors or 24.76 %, an addition which consisted of 93 errors or 44.28 %, misformation which consisted of 51 errors or 24.29% then, misordering which consisted of 14 errors or 6.66% Furthermore, the highest percentage was beside. It consisted of 93 errors or 44.28% then, the lowest percentage was misordering. It only had 14 errors or 6.66%. As a result, the sixth semester of English Literature students' highest types of error in Makassar Islamic University was Addition.

Causes of Error
According to J. C. Richards & Rodgers (1985), overgeneralization was a new strategy that did not comply with grammatical rules for a particular situation. In other that, it happened when students created a challenging structure based on their other structure. On the ignorance of the rule restriction, the learners are required to look at restriction on the existing structure. However, some limited rules errors could be justified in terms of analogies resulting from learning roles. On the incomplete of the rule restriction, the type of cause could occur because learners did not complete rules in the sentence context. In this case, there were some incomplete rules both in terms of grammar and meaning.
False concept hypothesized referred error rules in the various level learning, which might occur due to semantic errors. Therefore, students were mistaken into the target language; in other words, it failed to understand the concept.

Discussion
According to Richards & Rodgers (1985), a class of development error is derived from faulty comprehension of distinction in the target language. It included the misuse of tense. First of all, the researcher discussed errors that there were errors above. In the first example written by SRY, this student conducted error auxiliary because sometimes this student forgot to be. So the correct sentence was "he is very intelligent".
Secondly, according to the interview result, this student thought that second verb "meet" is "meeted". However, nothing was like it. The second form was "met". So the correct sentence was "Farid and Siska met me at the market when I bought food.Thirdly, in the third example written by third student (ASK), this student did not realize his error, because when the learner wrote the essay, this student acknowledged that the time allotted was limit, so this student made a false concept hypothesis. So the correct sentence was "there are so many friends in the campus". After analyzing the data and interviewed, the researcher found several errors causes similar to Richard's theory. Before that researcher discussed the errors causes put forward by Richard's theory.
Interference as the first cause of errors occurred since students form attendance based on their first language. It could also be proven from Dulay, Heidi, Marine, Burt, & Stephen (1982) that interference was automatic transfers due to habits, from the surface structure of the first language to the surface of the target language. During their research, they admitted that when making essays, they translated sentences from Indonesian into English in their minds. On the other hand, learners also arranged sentences based on Indonesian grammar instead of different Indonesian grammar.
Overgeneralization is the second cause of error occurred because students generalized English grammar rules. Error causes were students that made new structures so that their English structure was generalized. During the interview, learners knew the word structure well but time-limited them in working on the essay, so they made errors.
The third cause of the error was ignorance of rule restriction, where learners failed to use specific structures that must be applied in sentences such as preposition and verb. Students learned about preposition and verb but they answered using preposition and other verbs that did not match the sentence. Learners acknowledged that they were still confused to distinguish between the prepositions "into" and "at" with additional verbs.
The fourth error causes are incomplete rules. The researcher found curious students. For example, a learner made a statement in the form of a phrase, but he failed to use the incomplete phrase rules. So it happened incomplete rules restriction. The next cause of the error is the false concept hypothesis. It happened, because of students' misunderstanding about differences in the target language. Some learners realized that they had even learned about tenses and understood the material. However, when the lecturer gave evaluation about tenses, they had forgotten about the tenses material. This finding also proves Lim's research (2014: 96) that expressed the English language rules knowing the rules were tense, but their compilation was according to the rules, they only confused them. This learner added that students thought they translated it into English, they were confused where words they could use it, especially in the present and past forms such as entering the sentence must be in the present or past form.
Finally, the researcher explained the causes of errors similar to Richard's theory, mostly omission error. According to the students, the cause of the omission error was that students rarely added vocabulary so that if there were something we did not know we would ignore it. Students seldom trained to write an essay and added vocabulary. When the researcher asked about it, they said that they seldom wrote it. As such, they used the vocabulary that they knew as long as the meaning was the same.

Conclusion
This study deduces the type of errors and causes of the error made by the sixth semester of English Literature students in Makassar Islamic University in their essays those are, (1) there were 210 errors in students' essays, and (2) after conducting the interview, researcher finds the cause of errors that experienced by the sixth semester of English Literature students.