An Error Analysis on Past Tense in Recount Text Written by Lower Secondary School Students

Highlighting the importance of accuracy in grammar use, this study is interested to investigate the students’ error in English writing. Based on the preliminary study, the students seemed to have difficulty in conducting the sentences by using simple past. Therefore, this research explored more the errors on using simple past tense in writing recount text. The aim of this thesis was to know the types of error, to find out the dominant error, and to find out the sources of error. The research was a qualitative descriptive research. The subjects of this research were the thirty students of junior high school at eight grade. In collecting data, this research used a writing task about their unforgettable experiences which aimed to identify the errors produced by students in using the simple past in writing recount texts based on the linguistics category taxonomy and sources of error based on Ellis’ theory. The results implied that there were 13 types of errors made by students. The most dominant types of errors were miss-election of V-1 in the past event with the total number of error 56 items. Based on the results of the types of error was found sources of error that there were 96 items of interference errors, 68 items of intralingual errors, and 83 items of developmental errors.