Local and global errors in the journals writen by the first writing class students

Gany, Renaldy (2002) Local and global errors in the journals writen by the first writing class students. Bachelor thesis, Petra Christian University.

Abstract

This research is written to reveal local and global errors produced by the first writing class students in their journals. The study of local and global errors is the study on the communicative effect classification. It focuses on distinguishing between errors that seem to cause miscommunication (global) and those that do not (local). This study is conducted with the hope of giving a contribution to second language learners in the process of their second language acquisition. By evaluating the errors produced, this thesis is hoped to be able to help learners to learn when they correct the errors. Students and teachers here are expected to have a better understanding on the importance of making errors. This is a descriptive-qualitative study, as the writer describes and explores the errors without making any generalization from the findings. Here, the writer acts as the key instrument to collect the data. The errors in this study are identified and examined based on standard English grammar by Quirk and Greenbaum. The major theory applied was Politzer and Ramirez's linguistic category taxonomy to classify the local errors into categories and subcategories, while Dulay and Hurt's and Hurt and Kiparsky?s classifications of global errors were used to classify and explain the global errors. He found that most errors found in this study were considered local. Only three cases out of 311 errors found in this study were global. The students made almost all the subcategories of local error found in the Politzer and Ramirez's linguistic category taxonomy. Noun phrase deviation was the most common error. For global errors, the students used wrong sentence connector and missing cues to signal obligatory exceptions of syntactic rules.

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