The main purposes of the study were to describe the student’s grammatical errors in writing descriptive text made by the tenth grade students of MAN Maliku academic year 2012/2013 and to identify the causes of errors in writing descriptive text made by the tenth grade students of MAN Maliku academic year 2012/2013.
In this study, quantitative method was used by the writer. In collecting the data was used two techniques such as writing test and documentation. In analyzing the data was used some techniques such as collecting the written text made by the students, identifying of errors, describing types of errors, explaining, the causes of errors and evaluating the errors of written text made by the students. The subject of this study was the tenth grade students of MAN Maliku class A of 24 students.
Research findings showed the errors in writing descriptive text made by the students classified into eight categories.They were wrong word, wrong word form, word missing, verb, subject, subject verb agreement, and pronoun.The highest errors made by the tenth grade students were wrong word and the second wrong word form.
The errors in writing descriptive text made by the tenth grade students of MAN Maliku classified into five categories based on linguistic taxonomy, they were sentences, noun phrase, verb phrase, word order and auxiliary. Based on the result the highest of errors classifications of all the text made by students in writing descriptive text was in sentence (51.25%), then AU (auxiliary) (17.5%), NP (12.5%), VP(11.25) and the last was WO (7.5%).
The errors in writing descriptive text made by the tenth grade students of MAN Maliku based on surface strategy taxonomy classified into four categories. They were omission, misordering, addition and misformation. Based on the result the highest classification of errors made by students in writing descriptive text were misordering (46.25%), the second were misformation (alternating form) (25%), the third were omission (grammatical morpheme) (13.75%) and the fewest were addition (simple sentence) and (archi form)(7.5%).