Syntactical Error on Students’ Descriptive Composition

Abstract

This study tries to identify types and causes of errors committed by students of English department at Language and Arts Faculty in their compositions. The compositions were descriptive in nature written by twenty-two fifth- semester students based on a predetermined topic. The data obtained was identified and then categorized to determine the types of and causes of errors. The data analysis indicated that there were ten types committed by the subjects. These ten types of errors are due to four potential causes of errors: intra-lingual transfer, insufficient learning/teaching, incomplete application of target language rules, and the nature of the target language system/rules.

Key words:  errors, intra-lingual transfer, composition