An error analysis on derivational suffixes in the students' writing assignments of English Teacher Education Department of State Islamic University of Sunan Ampel Surabaya

Learning English as a foreign language is more challenging than learning first language. Therefore, it will cause errors in learning the foreign language. Because of that reason, the researcher intends to conduct a study about the students’ errors. This research aimed to investigate the derivational suffixes errors in the students’ writing assignment of English Teacher Education Department of State Islamic University of Sunan Ampel Surabaya. This research contained two research questions, they are; what are derivational suffix errors in the students’ writing assignments of english teacher education department of State Islamic University of Sunan Ampel Surabaya? and what are the most frequent derivational suffix errors in the students’ writing assignment of english teacher education department of State Islamic University of Sunan Ampel Surabaya?. By applying descriptive qualitative study approach, this research used documentation to collect the data. The researcher only took three students’ writing assignments to be analyzed. The results of the study showed that all the students make error in the use of derivational suffixes in their writing assignment. The researcher found that there were 133 error words in form of derivatioal suffix and it is classified into four types, they were nominal suffix error, verbal suffix error, adjectival suffix error and adverbial suffix error. From the analysis, it also shows that the most frequent error occurs on nominal suffix with 60 frequencies (45.112%), the second most frequent error is adjectival suffix with 52 frequencies (39.097%), the third is adverbial suffix with 13 frequencies (9.774%) and the least frequent error happens to verbal suffix with 8 frequencies (6.015%). In other words, the most dominant of error was in nominal suffixes.