Redi Fahdian Putra Setyawan. (2025). Exploring Students’ Experience of Writing Sentences in Descriptive Paragraphs (Undergraduate Thesis, English Education Program, Faculty of Teacher Training and Education, Universitas Muhammadiyah Jember). Advisors: (1) Muhlisin Rasuki, M.Pd., M.A., Ed.D., (2) Dr. Indri Astutik, M.Pd.
The purpose of this study is to analyze the grammatical errors made by seventh-grade students of SMP Ma’arif 08 Wuluhan in using the simple present tense when writing descriptive texts. Writing is considered one of the most complex skills in English language learning, especially for junior high school students who are still in the early stages of mastering grammar rules. Many students face difficulties in constructing proper English sentences due to their limited knowledge of grammar, vocabulary, and sentence structure, particularly when applying the rules of the simple present tense.
This research is a descriptive quantitative study. The data were collected through a writing test in which students were asked to produce a descriptive text based on a given topic. A total of 29 students participated in this study. The students' written works were analyzed using the surface strategy taxonomy proposed by Dulay, Burt, and Krashen (1982), which classifies errors into four types: omission, addition, misformation, and misordering.
The results showed that from a total of 92 errors, omission was the most frequent type with 53 occurrences, followed by misformation with 27 errors, misordering with 9 errors, and addition with only 3 errors. The dominant errors were mainly caused by the students’ limited understanding of subject-verb agreement, improper use of auxiliary verbs, and interference from their first language. Most students tended to omit required grammatical elements such as “to be,” possessive pronouns, or the “-s” ending in third-person singular forms. These errors reflect students’ lack of competence in applying the rules of the simple present tense.
The findings of this study are expected to be useful for English teachers in identifying students’ weaknesses in writing and in developing more effective teaching strategies. It is also hoped that this research will raise students’ awareness of common grammatical errors and encourage them to improve their writing skills. Moreover, this study may serve as a reference for future researchers who wish to conduct similar studies on grammatical error analysis in English writing.
Keywords: Error Analysis, Simple Present Tense, Descriptive Text, Surface Strategy Taxonomy, Writing Skill