GRAMMATICAL AGREEMENT ERRORS ON STUDENTS’ COMPOSITION

Nissa Rizki Gusti

University of Balikpapan

ABSTRACT
The aim of this paper is to find out about the grammatical agreement errors in writing
compositions made by the 6th semester students. To achieve that purpose, the data were
derived from several writing compositions from the 6th semester students. In which the
writing compositions are research papers. The result shows that from the 3 categories
of grammatical agreement, Subject-Verb agreement is one of the grammatical agreement
categories which the most frequent error.

Keywords : grammatical agreement, error, subject-verb agreement

1. Background

Generally writing is both very important for adult learners and is often very difficult. According
to Tarigan (1985: 5) writing is productive skills for writing an indirect communication and the nature
of the character is very different from that expressed by speaking directly, therefore writing is included
an ability. Writing in a foreign language is one of the most difficult skills for more or less all learners.
Developing writing skill is considered highly complex if not the most complex in relationship with
listening, speaking and reading. What makes writing a very bothersome task for EFL learners is the fact
that it requires some criterion of acceptability relative to different aspects of writing which include
content, organization, vocabulary, language use, spelling, punctuation and accurate capitalization and
paragraphing. Brooks and Penn (1970: 20) also state, for one thing, in writing, we must understand the
structure of the Language, what the parts of speech do, how the words relate to one another, what
individual words mean, the rules of grammar and punctuation.
Furthermore, writing is different from other skills; it can be said as the combination of all skills.
Heaton (1975:127) stated that writing composition is a task, which involves the students in manipulating
word in grammatically correct sentences and in linking those sentences to form a piece of continuous
writing which successfully communicates their writer thoughts and ideas of certain topic. To make a
good writing, it must be constructed according to rules or conventions of target language. Learners must
apply the five general components of the writing process; content, form, grammar, style, and mechanic.
Grammar is an essential part of the use of language process, both in spoken and written
language. According to Jeffrey Coghill and Stacy Magendanz (2003: XVI) The grammar of a language
is the set of rules that govern its structure. Grammar Determines how words are arranged to form
meaningful units. So it would be impossible to learn language effectively without knowing the
grammar, because grammar helps learners to identify grammatical forms, which serves to enhance and
sharpen the expression of meaning. The importance of grammar is also strengthened by Mr. Kalend O.
He states “Having a good grammar system of a language, learners will be helpful in delivering their
ideas, messages and feelings either to the listeners or readers, language without grammar would be
disorganized and causes some communicative problems, for example we can not say something in
passive sentence using English if we do not know the grammar concept of passive voice”. Writing and
grammar experts are individuals who excel at arranging words to phrases, phrases to sentences,
sentences to paragraphs and paragraphs into a complete written work. These works are both pleasing to
read and correct as to the structural rules that make up the composition. It is sad that one cannot be an

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expert at one without being an expert at both because proper writing can only be achieved to correct
grammar and correct grammar can only be highlighted on written works. Given Noguchi's (1991)
analysis that grammar choices affect writing style, sentence combining is an effective method for
helping students develop fluency and variety in their own writing style. Students can explore sentence
variety, length, parallelism, and other syntactic devices by comparing their sentences with sentences
from other writers. They also discover the decisions writers make in revising for style and effect.
When we use the word in the context of grammar, it has a similar meaning: grammatical
agreement between two parts of a sentence. Agreement is a traditional term used in grammatical theory
and description to refer to a formal relationship between elements, whereby a form of one word requires
a corresponding form of another (David Crystal, 1985). Grammatical agreement is a language
phenomenon where a word is explicitly marked for its grammatical relationship with another word in a
sentence (Wechsler, 2009). For instance, the singular -s suffix in She know-s as opposed to They know,
shows the relation between the singular grammatical subject she and the verb knows. When two words
in a sentence are said to “agree”, this means that they share certain features such as gender, number,
person, or others (Beuls and Hofer, 2011). Person refers to the quality of being (e.g. 1st, 2nd, 3rd).
Number is the quality that distinguishes between singular (one entity) and plural (numerous entities).
Gender is the quality that distinguishes the entities as masculine or feminine.
The research object of this paper is a student’s writing composition of the 6th semester students.
Those compositions are research papers that have been made by the 6th semester students. They are the
students from faculty of letter in the English literature department of Universitas Balikpapan on the 6th
semester. They are Indonesian learners of English who took English literature as their major in
University.
This paper will focus on the grammatical agreement errors in students’ writing composition of
the 6th semester. The researcher chose to explain about grammatical agreement because it is present in
many of the world’s languages today and has become an essential feature that guides linguistic
processing.

2. The scope of the research

The scope of this research is to find the grammatical agreement errors in the students’
composition, and the researcher classified the types of grammatical agreement errors into 3 categories
that are subject-verb agreement, singular-plural and prepositional phrase.

3. Research and Objective

In this paper, the researcher aims to find out the grammatical agreement errors in students’
writing composition of the 6th semester. And thus lead to these following questions:

1. Which type of errors is the most frequent in the students’ composition?

2. What are the types of grammatical agreement errors in the students’ writing composition?

The objectives of the study are to describe of grammatical agreement errors in writing made by
the student, and by reading the result of this study they can improve their ability in writing especially
in writing composition.

4. Method

The researcher collects several writing compositions from the 6th semester students. In which
the writing composition is a research paper. Then the researcher identified and analyzed the error from
the paper regardless the topic of the paper itself. The researcher main focus, was more on the error that

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occur in the sentences of the paper. First of all, the researcher read all the writing composition of several
students. Secondly the researcher tried to identify the errors. After checking it thoroughly, the
researchers counted the frequencies of errors. After that, the researcher was categorizing the errors into
several categories depends on where the errors occurred. From the data that the researcher have
acquired, with the help of SPSS application the researcher then will make a number of tables and charts
of percentage based from the error.

5. Previous Study

A number of researchers focusing on grammatical agreement error of English learners have

created their own experiment or tests. For example, an insightful study deals with errors which include
tenses (verb forms), number agreement, and active-passive voice, word order, and word formation on
students’ essays.The purpose of this study is to find out the types of errors committed by the students
in Written 4 class based on five categories which are addition, omission, misformation, misordering
and blends was conducted by Limengka & Kuntjara.
The findings of their study showed only students with A score produced two types of errors
which are misformation and omission. Besides, students with B score did not produce blends at all. The
rest of the students produced each type of errors at least once.
Students made errors since they apply Indonesian language speaking style in their sentence
construction. Therefore, their word ordering tends to be like spoken Indonesian language. In addition,
their lack of knowledge on word families, word formation, and tenses also caused them to produce 178
misformation errors (66.92%), especially on nouns and verb.
Despite their status as students of Written English 4 class, which is the final writing class, the
students still produced so many errors on basic English grammar and structures. In this class, the
students are asked to write essays on some given topics on current issues.The quality of their essays is
supposed to be newspaper article quality with concise and error-free sentences. However, some of the
students produced so many errors. The writer noticed that 75% of the errors accumulated on six students
who got B, C, and D grade which possibly means, these students were actually not qualified to pass the
previous level of writing class and join Written English 4 class. Even in the final test, which was held
at the end of the semester, the students could not perform well.
As a suggestion, the students should practice more on English grammar, and read many good
reading sources to change their sentence construction pattern. Besides, the curriculum should also
provide students with syntax class in their early semester instead of in their late semester as they need
to learn about correct sentence construction as early as possible. There is also another suggestion for
the teachers of written class. In this research, the writer found out that students who got B grade
produced 63 errors which is surprising as students with D grade produced 67 errors. This could happen
as the portion of grammar evaluation in the grading policy is only 10-15%. In fact, ungrammatical
sentences might cause confusion and miscommunication in students’ writing. So, it is essential that the
teachers increase the portion of grammar evaluation in grading policy up to 40%. The writer also
suggests that further research is conducted on error analysis using different variables. There are many
more factors that the writer has not measured in the students’ essays such as coherence, cohesion,
punctuation, etc.
Finally, in this light of this line of research, there is very little research focusing on grammatical
agreement errors of English learners in the field of sciences. These reasons suggest a need for more
studies in this research area.

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 6. Finding and Discussion
The following graph below indicates the results of the most frequent of grammatical agreement
errors in the student's composition.

As seen from the graph, the most frequent of grammatical agreement errors is subject-verb
agreement which has 20 points. Subject-verb agreement is the rule of grammar that states that singular
subjects must agree with singular verbs and plural or compound subjects must agree with plural verbs.
The verb in a sentence must agree with the subjects and not with any other word that is placed between
them (McCray Hill Grammar Dictionary).

SENTENCE CORRECTION
1. So novel are longer than novella and So novel is longer than novella and
a short story. a short story.

2. Literary work are divided into three Literary work is divided into three
types. types.

3. This novel tell about the adventures This novel tells about the adventures
of the main character. of the main character

4. The researcher create this study
with the title “transhumanism”
5. Jane Eyre have been adapted
several times in television and
cinema.
6. Jane Eyre try to break the limit with
the tradition
The researchers create this study
with the title “transhumanism”
Jane Eyre has been adapted several
times in television and cinema.
Jane Eyre tries to break the limit
with the tradition

Table 1.1

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 The table above describes the grammatical error between subject and verb. For example in the
first sentence , the word “novel” as a subject is singular , so the verb should be singular too because the
rule of subject-verb agreemnt is a verb agrees with its subject in number. In the third sentence, the verb
"tell" is not agree with the subject "novel", to make a verb singular, add an -s or -es ending to the verb
and to make a verb plural, leave off the –s or –es ending.

Furthermore, on the graph shows the other types of grammatical agreement, those are singular-
plural agreement and prepositional phrase agreement. Singular relates to the quantity “one” for count
nouns, to the unique referent for most proper nouns and to undifferentiated mass for uncountable nouns.
Plural relates to the quantity “two or more” for count nouns, to the unique referent for some proper
nouns and to individual units that are seen as reflecting plural composition. In addition, prepositional
phrase is a group of words that contains no verb and that begin with preposition and end with a noun or
pronoun.

SENTENCE CORRECTION

1. There are 3 option we gave There are 3 options we gave

2. However 50% are already have a However 50% are already

kids have a kid

Table 1.2

In the table 1.2 shows a grammatical agreement error between singular and plural. As seen on
the first sentence, the number "3" means plural, so the related noun should be ending with -s to make it
plural too. Furthermore, in the second sentence article “a” means singular, so the noun that related to
the article should be singular too. When a noun indicates one only, it is a singular noun. When a noun
indicates more than one, it is plural.

SENTENCE CORRECTION

1. It is very interesting because in the It is very interesting because in the

early year transhumanism become early year of transhumanism become
hot issues hot issues
2. A paper on marriage during college A paper about marriage during college
and research samples and research samples

Table 1.3

A preposition shows the relationship between a noun, pronoun, or another word in the
sentence. As seen from the table, the students negligent putting a proposition in the sentence to
expressing a relation to another word or element, and the students also make a mistake in the
use of prepositions. There are 2 major rules when it comes to the use of prepositions. The first
major rule deals with preposition choice. Certain prepositions must follow certain words, and
the correct preposition must be used to make relationships between words in the sentences
clear. The second major rule deals with the prepositions place in the sentence. Prepositions
must be followed by nouns, and prepositions can only go on the end of the sentence in certain
situations.

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7. Conclusion

After all of the tests had been corrected and the relevant data had been selected based on the
purpose of the research, it was found that there were 33 errors. The researcher identified the errors
based on the 3 categories, those are subject-verb agreement, singular-plural, and prepositional
phrase. Based on data obtained from the students' composition, Subject-Verb agreement is one of
the grammatical agreement categories which the most frequent error.

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