An Analysis of Students’ Error in Constructing Passive Voice

Abstract

This study aims to analyze the students’ error in constructing passive voice. This study uses descriptive qualitative research. The sample of this study is upgrading class C of Sunan Drajat Female Islamic Boarding School that consists of 15 students. The data were collected by using test and interview. The test is writing test which consists of 5 sentences of Present Tense including simple present, present continuous, present future, present perfect & present future perfect. The students were asked to change those 5 sentences into passive voice. Then the data would be analyzed based on the Surface Strategy Taxonomy by Dulay’s theory including omission, addition, misformation, and misordering. Futhermore, the students’ difficulty in changing avtive sentence into passive sentence will be analyzed too based on passive sentence structure including the usage of “subject, be, V3, and object”. The result of the research indicates that the error total of omission was 13 errors with the percentages of 21%, addition was 3 errors with the percentages of 10%, misordering was 7 errors with the percentages of 24%, and misformation was 13 errors with the percentages of 45%. Most of the students do error in the usage of “be, V3, and object”.  In the case of “be”, the students don’t know the appropriate auxiliary for the subject and  for the tenses in passive form. In addition, in the case of V3 usage, the students don’t know about regular and irregular verb so that they do error in choosing the correct of V3. Futhermore, the students’ lack mastery of pronoun makes them do error in choosing the appropriate object which the subject and object pronoun have different form.