ENGLISH REVIEW: Journal of English Education ISSN 2301-7554 Vol. 4, Issue 1, December 2015 https://journal.uniku.ac.id/index.php/ERJEE ERROR ANALYSIS OF WRITING VERBS IN DISCUSSION TEXT Dadang Solihat Department of English Education, University of Kuningan, Indonesia E-mail: dacu_qta@yahoo.co.id Diah Novianti Department of English Education, University of Kuningan, Indonesia E-mail: diahnovianti1994@gmail.com APA Citation: Solihat, D. & Novianti, D. (2015). Error analysis of writing verbs in discussion text. English Review: Journal of English Education, 4(1), 75-81 Received: 20-08-2015 Accepted: 02-11-2015 Published: 01-12-2015 Abstract: The objective of this study is to find out the error types of writing verbs in students‟ discussion texts and to identify the factors causing verb errors at the fourth semester students of English major in University of Kuningan. The subject of this study is 20 students. The limitation of the problem is to classify the students‟ errors based on Linville„s error types in writing verbs, there are subject-verb agreement errors, verb tense errors, and verb form errors. This research is using qualitative method by collecting data from documents, questionnaires, and interviews. The result showed that the highest error which most students made is subject-verb agreement. Its frequency is 105 errors or 78.95 %. The second common error is verb form with 15 errors or 11.28 %. The third common error is verb-tense with 13 errors or 9.77 %. The factors causing verb errors are interlingual factor and intralingual or developmental factor. It is influenced by the students‟ lack of knowledge and understanding of the use of verbs. Key words: subject-verb agreement error, verb tense error, verb form error, interlingual factor, intralingual or developmental factor INTRODUCTION Generally, English is taught and assessed in terms of four skills, namely listening, speaking, reading, and writing. Those four skills are divided into two types, namely receptive skills which consist of listening and reading, and productive skills which consist of speaking and writing. All the skills are needed in learning English, because they have their own important role. But, Brown (2000, p. 216) stated that “the most obvious approach to analyze interlanguage is to study the speech and writing of learners.” It makes writing needed to learn. Since, writing is the productive skill that involves grammatical in a structured way. In writing skills, grammar is a major role to produce sentences in a text. It corresponds with Brown (2001, p. 362) who said that “grammar is the system of rules governing the conventional arrangement and relationship of words in a sentence.” The students need to acquire basic grammatical knowledge to write effectively. In grammatical rules, a sentence usually consists of subject, verb, and object. A sentence can be meaningful because there is a verb as word that can express action of the subject. But, some 75