SURFACE STRATEGY TAXONOMY

Supporting Lecturer : Irawansyah, M.Pd

Subject : Error Analysis
Semester / Class : 6 / A

Arranged by group 2
 Arjun Bima Pratama 2111040134
 Hanif Azharianto 2111040163
 Syarif Hizbullah 2111040229

ENGLISH EDUCATION DEPARTMENT

FACULTY OF TARBIYAH AND TEACHER
STATE ISLAMIC UNIVERSITY
RADIN INTAN LAMPUNG
2024
A. INTRODUCTION
Learning English language is one of science that should be learnt to all the people.
English becomes very important and useful for us. The existence of English becomes an
international language of daily conversation which is spoken by many people in each country.
Since its position as International language, English plays important role in International
relations such as in science, economic, diplomatic, commerce, politic, etc. As one of developing
countries, Indonesia has to keep abreast the world’s scientific and technological development.
English has been promoted to all levels of education in Indonesia for many years. Furthermore,
the Indonesian government has included English as one of the compulsory subjects to be taught
in each level of education such as elementary school, junior high school, senior high school and
university. It gives the students to engage their English learning process in each different level
from the lowest to the highest level at elementary until university. It means that Indonesian
government is going to effort the realization of education national goal and to develop the
intelligence of the student

B. LITERATURE OF THEORIES
1. SURFACE STRATEGY TAXONOMY
Surface strategy taxonomy stresses how learners’ modified surface structure can
eliminate items that are needed or add unnecessary items; they may give wrong
information about an item or misplace it. The types of this category are omission,
addition, misformation, and misordering errors. (Mufidah & Islam, 2022)

Based on (Dulay et al., 1982), The surface strategy taxonomy is categorized

according to the ways that surface structures that will be altered, such as omitting
necessary items, adding unnecessary ones, misforming, misordering item. Added to that,
James (1998) argued this taxonomy is a target modification taxonomy which is
categorizes information based on the ways in which the learner's. erroneous version is
different from the presumed target version.

Analyzing error from this perspective has much promise for the researcher to
concern with identifying cognitive processes that underlie the student's reconstruction of
the new language. It also makes us aware that learner's errors result from their active
ways of using the interim principles to produce the target language (Dulay et al., 1982).
Under this taxonomy, errors consist of four types: omission, addition, misformation, and
misordering (James, 1998). The omission is one of the error types characterized by the
absence of an item that must appear in a well-formed utterance, for example, his name
George. It this sentence, the student omitted verb auxiliary such as is. It should be his
name is George; The addition is a type of error characterized by the presence of an
item. It is the opposite of omission errors. It usually occurs when the students are often
too faithful to use certain rules which result in errors. For example. The sparrows are
flying. Here is the addition of morpheme "s" with the sparrow that is not needed. The
correct sentence is The sparrow is flying. At least, there are three types of addition
errors, namely double marking. regularization, and simple addition; Misformation is the
use of the wrong form of a structure or morpheme. In misformation error. the student
supplies an item although it is still incorrect, for example. He is licking himself. It should
be He is licking himself. There are three categories of misformation error, in this case,
namely regularization, archiforms. and alternating forms. Misordering is characterized by
the incorrect placement of a morpheme or group of morphemes in an utterance. It occurs
when towards to first and second language learning in constructions that have already
been acquired, such as I do not know what is daddy doing. The correct sentence is I do
not know what daddy is doing.
James proposes that the learners’ erroneous version is different from the
presumed target version. This highlights the ways surface structures are altered. The
students may omit necessary items or add unnecessary one, they may misform the
items or disorder them. Errors can be classified into four types: omission, addition,
misformation and misording. Then, James adds blend error as the category of surface
strategy taxonomy.
a) Omission
When a learner is leaving off necessary items that must emerge in a well-
performed utterance, that learner is doing omission error. As an example we
know that morpheme or words can be distinguished into two classes: content
word (e.g. noun, verb, adjective, and adverb) and grammatical word such as
noun and verb inflection (-s, -ed, -ing), the article (a, an, the), verb auxiliaries (is,
am,are, will, can, must etc), preposition (in, on, at, etc). language learners
generally omit grammatical morpheme much more frequently than content word
such as in John new student, He speak English well, and she eating dinner.
Incorrect: The people look forward to work
Correct : The people look forward to working
b) Addition
Addition errors, which are the contrary of omission, are characterized by the
presence of items that should otherwise not appear in a well-performed
utterance. Generally, it occurs in second language acquisition of the leaner.
Regularizations, double markings, and simple addition are kind of addition error
which have been examined in the speech of both first language and second
language leaner.
Incorrect: People can live because of the water
Correct : People can live because of water
c) Misformation
 Misformation,are the error that characterized by the use if the wrong from of a
structure or morpheme. there are three type of misformation namely,
regularization error (neglecting exception and dissemination rules to domain
where the learner don’t use the rules transformation of verb and countable or
uncountable noun, for instancefalled, Runned, womans, phenomenons,
critorions,etc) archi-form (selection of one member of a class of form to represent
other on the class.
Incorrect: It must be completed at thet time
Correct : It must be completed at that time
d) Misordering
Misording errors are characterized by the incorrect placement of a morpheme in
an utterance. They come about systematically for both first and second language
learning in construction that already been acquired. For instance:He is all the
time late .all the time is misordered.
Incorrect: Students get half and an hour workshop per-month
Correct : Students get an hour and half hour workshop per-month

C. CONCLUSION
Surface Strategy Taxonomy categorizes errors based on how learners try to fix them, like
leaving out words, adding extra ones, using the wrong forms, or mixing up the order of words.
Knowing these strategies helps teachers guide students towards better communication skills.

it can be concluded that the most error made by students is the omission, where they often
reduce some parts needed in English. While developmental or intralingual is the most common
source, which causes errors because students still do not understand the grammar rules in the
English language. This research is expected to be the direction for English teachers, especially
in writing to consider the most errors made by the student, so the teachers can decide which
area still needs improvement. Moreover, this research can be a base for further research about
grammatical errors and writing

D. REFERENCES