An Analysis of Students Errors in Writing Cause and Effect Essay at the Fifth Semester of IAIN Langsa

The tittle of this research is “An Analysis of Students’s Error in Writing Cause and Effect Essay at the fifth semester of IAIN Langsa. In academic years 2017/2018”. The purposes of this study were to find out the grammatical errors, to identify the dominate errors and to investigate the factors of grammatical errors made by students. This study employed a descriptive design. The data were collected from students document task. The object of this study was the students’ document task. The subject of this study was the fifth students of English Department. The result of the study showed the grammatical errors made by students were subject verb agreement (23,67%), omit a word (17,75%), punctuation (15,38%), singular/plural (13,02%), meaning not clear (13,02%), add a word (9,47%), adjective and noun order (4,14%), spelling (2,96%). Therefore, the three highest common errors are from the data, the most common error made by students were subject verb agreement (23,67%), omit a word (17,75%), punctuation (15,38%). The researcher investigated that the factors of error made by students were interlingua transfer, intralingual transfer, and context of learning.