ERRORS OF LINGUISTICS COMPONENTS FOUND IN THE BACKGROUND OF THE STUDY OF THE S1 STUDENTS’ THESES

Making errors is one of the most inevitable things in the world, especially in language learning, since it is a natural part of learning process. Students’ errors can be observed, analyzed, classified, and studied by using error analysis and the result of analysis can indicate the students’ development in mastering the language and help the teachers in teaching and learning process. This study analyzes the linguistics components in the theses’ background of the study of the English Department’s students in Surabaya State University. The researcher used descriptive qualitative as the research design because the objectives of this study were to describe the profile of morphological, lexical, syntactic, and mechanical errors made by the university students in their theses’ background of the study. The researcher took six theses from three groups randomly. She took two theses from the students who graduated earlier (less than four years), two theses from the students who graduated on time (four years) and two theses from the students who graduated late. Then, in analyzing and interpreting the data, the researcher used Ferris’s error analysis model as the guidline.The findings of this study revealed that: 1) For the morphological error, the researcher found that from all kind of errors in morphological error, the most problematic errors were subject-verb agreement errors and article/determiner errors, especially for misused of zero article (O) for the. 2) For the lexical error, the students only made few preposition errors and other subcategories errors in lexical error. It indicated that the students had already mastered the English vocabularies to construct the appropriate sentences. 3) For the syntactic error, she found that the students made the most errors in omitted word and run-on sentence. And 4) for the mechanical error, she found that punctuation error, especially in using comma, was the most problematic error followed by capitalization error.