“Sentential Concordance and Its Deviations in Introductory Chapter Submitted by English Undergraduate Students Universitas Negeri Padang in Final Project of Thesis Writing Course

The purposes of this study were to describe the sentential concordance in introductory chapter written by the students, its deviations and their causes. This study was a descriptive study, where the sources of data were documents and interview. The documents were final project of Thesis Writing Course written by English undergraduate students Universitas Negeri Padang in the academic year 2013/2014. 41 documents were selected as the subject of this research, while 23 students were randomly selected to be interviewed. Even though the findings of this study show that the sentential concordance in students’ introductory chapter was in a high degree, there were some deviations in sentential concordance found in students’ introductory chapter. They were grammatical deviations (both errors and mistakes). There was 1 document containing errors in Pronoun-Antecedent Concord, while the other deviations were mistakes. Mistakes mostly occurred in Subject-Verb and Noun Phrase Concord, and the majority of them were omission and substitution. Besides, there were three causes of these deviations. The first was Intralingual error, caused by Hypercorrection and Overgeneralization. The second was Language-Learning Strategies, in which more than half students had instrumental motivation. Moreover, the strategies they used when writing were appeal to authority, avoidance, and translation. The other causes were fatigue, lack of concentration, confusion, laziness, and running out of time