Verb Errors in the Essays of Students Majoring in English Education: A Formal and Functional Perspective

As the effort to provide a pedagogical input for the development of teacher education of English as a foreign language in Indonesia, this paper aims to reveal the verb nature of Indonesian students majoring in English education program. To obtain the purpose of study, a qualitative research approach and a text-analysis method were employed. As the participants, four second-year students and six third-year counterparts participated in this study. The participants were given five argumentative-essay questions to answer. Overall, more than 90% of verbs of each participant were already accurate while the rest were still incorrect. The verb errors of both groups were not only evaluated based on the formal grammar perspective but also were further discussed based on the functional perspective. The findings of this study reveals that there is a different tendency between both analyzed data sets. The second-year students tended to make errors in missing ‘be’ either in relational and material clauses. In comparison, the third-year counterparts had the tendency to make errors in subject-verb agreement in material clauses. Based on the findings, it is expected that there will be different emphases of teaching grammar especially verbs for different levels of Indonesian students majoring in English education.