Grammatical Errors in English Descriptive Essay: Indonesian Case

The current research was conducted at a high school (SMAK Harapan Denpasar) located in Indonesia. It aims to analyze grammatical errors in descriptive writing of grade X students and analyze the factors that cause these errors. The data was taken from descriptive writings about family members. It was collected through the linguistics field technique. Next, it was analyzed by the surface strategy taxonomic theory that proposed by Dulay et al. This theory classified errors into omissions, additions, misformations, and misorderings. The sources of errors were analyzed by the interlanguage and intralingual errors proposed by Richard. The result of the study shows that there are 248 errors. The errors consist of 147 omissions, 79 misformations, 45 additions, and 13 misorderings. The sources of errors are interlanguage and intralingual factors.