ABSTRACT
This research was conducted under the consideration that passive voice is included in the competence based curriculum as one of the linguistic competence that senior high school students have to master, and passive voice is not so easy for senior high school students that they probably make errors dealing with passive voice.
The problems of this research were formulated by the following questions (1) what errors are made by the eleventh grade students of SMA Pangudi Luhur Don Bosko Semarang? and (2) what are the causes/sources of the errors? Therefore, the objectives of this research are to describe errors which are made by the eleventh grade students at SMA Pangudi Luhur Don Bosko Semarang and the sources of errors.
In order to collect the data, the writer took the eleventh grade students at SMA Pangudi Luhur Don Bosko which total number was 170 as the population, and she took 20 % out of the population using random sampling technique as the respondents. Then, she conducted a try-out test consisting of 50 completion items and 50 conversion items. After calculating the test reliability and doing item analysis, she discarded 20 bad items. So there were 80 items which consisted of 38 completion items and 42 conversion items in the real test.
To analyze the data, she followed such procedures in error analysis proposed by Corder (1974) as collection of a sample of learner language, identification of errors, description of errors, and explanation of errors. Based on the analysis, she found out that students made errors in the use of auxiliaries, main verbs, appropriate tenses, negative sentences, interrogative sentences, spelling, omission of by, and pronoun. Those errors resulted from both mother-tongue influence (interlingual error) and target language causes (intralingual errors)
Having analyzed the students’ errors dealing with passive voice, the writer suggests that teachers give clear explanation of the passive voice principles, provide passive voice examples in appropriate contexts and more passive voice exercises, and encourage students to memorize the irregular verbs.
