SYNTACTIC ERROR IN THE VIII GRADE STUDENTS’ WRITING OF RECOUNT TEXT AT SMP SWASTA PAHLAWAN NASIONAL

This study deals with the student’s syntactic errors in writing recount text. The objectives of this study were to find out the errors made by the students and to find out the most dominant one. The population of this research was the eight grade students at SMP Pahlawan Nasional Medan that consisted of 56 students and the researcher took all the students as the sample. The instrument of the test was Recount Text test. The research was conducted by using descriptive. Having analyzed the students’ writing, it was found that all the five types of error occurred in this study. They were, error of noun phrase error (117), verb phrase error (102), verb construction error (122), word order error (171) and some transformation error (117), which totaled 629 occurrences. The most dominant error made by the students was the word order error which is 171 occurrences or about 27.19%. The error might caused by interlingual interference, interlingual interference means that a cause of errors where learners transfer their native language system into the target language system.