GRAMMATICAL ERROR ANALYSIS OF ENGLISH SENTENCES PRODUCED BY ENGLISH EDUCATION STUDENTS AT THE STATE ISLAMIC UNIVERSITY OF NORTH SUMATRA: A CONTRASTIVE STUDY

Abstrak

This study aims to analyze grammatical errors in English sentences produced by English Education students at the State Islamic University of North Sumatra by applying error analysis and contrastive analysis approaches. This research uses a descriptive qualitative method, with data consisting of 20 English sentences written by students. The data were analyzed to identify, classify, and explain the types of grammatical errors as well as their possible causes. The findings reveal that the most frequent errors include subject–verb agreement, verb tense, auxiliary usage, plural forms, article use, prepositions, and word order. From the perspective of error analysis, the errors are categorized into omission, addition, misformation, and misordering, indicating that learners’ errors are systematic and reflect their interlanguage development. Meanwhile, contrastive analysis shows that many of these errors are influenced by structural differences between Indonesian and English, particularly in areas where Indonesian lacks tense marking, subject–verb agreement, articles, and copula verbs. However, some errors are also caused by intralingual factors such as overgeneralization and incomplete understanding of grammatical rules. Therefore, this study highlights the importance of integrating error analysis and contrastive analysis to better understand learners’ difficulties and to improve English teaching strategies, especially for prospective English teachers.