The study was aimed at investigating the students’ grammatical errors in using sentences of past tense made by the students at the tenth year at MA Musliamat NU Palangka Raya. The limitation of the study is that result of the study could not be generalized to all tenth year. It was limited to XA class of MA Muslimat NU Palangka Raya.
In this study, the writer was used content analysis method focused or identifying and analyzing the types of grammatical errors in students’ writing. The time of the study was from August 26 - September 26, 2013 at MA Musliamat NU Palangka Raya. Sample of this study was 22 students at XA class. In data collecting technique, it was used written test and documentation. To analyze the data used error analysis.
Research finding showed that the grammatical errors in using sentences of past tense made by the students at the tenth year at MA Muslimat NU Palangka Raya classified into thirteen categories. They were unnecessary word 21.46%, article 14.89%, misspelling 13.88%, subject verb agreement 11.61%, wrong word form 8.33%, capitalization 7.57%, wrong word 6.56%, verb tense 4.79%, wrong word order 4.04%, word missing 3.28%, verb 1.51%, preposition 1.51%, conjunction 0,50%.
The cause of the grammatical errors in using sentences of past tense made by the students at the tenth year at MA Musliamat NU Palangka Raya classified into three categories. They were intralingual errors 53.22%, other 31.18% and interlingual 15.59%.
The highest errors made by the students at the tenth year at MA Muslimat NU Palangka Raya in using sentences of past tense were unnecessary word, the second errors were article, the third errors were misspelling and the last errors were subject verb agreement.
The highest causes of grammatical errors made by the students at the tenth year at MA Muslimat NU Palangka Raya in using sentences of past tense were intralingual errors, the second were other and the last errors were interlingual errors.