An Analysis of the Students’ Preposition Errors in Writing Recount Text at English Department in Academic Year 2013/2014 at IAIN Imam Bonjol Padang

Preposition is one of language elements that plays an important role to join the words to build sentences. However, the errors of using it still occured in the sixth semester students’ writing compositions. This research was conducted to find out and analyze the errors on using preposition that occured in the students’ writing of recount essay. This research was classified into descriptive one. This research was about the errors of preposition used in the recount essay done by the sixth semester students of English Department of IAIN Imam Bonjol Padang. The data of this research were the incorrect prepositions found in the recount essay written by the students. The data were collected through giving the students a writing test of recount text. In order to know the causes of the errors, the data were collected by doing the interview. This research investigated about the types of errors, which type that mostly occured of preposition used in the writing of recount essay and what were the causes. The findings showed that the students made some errors on the use of preposition. They were within the category of interlingual; features of L1 were transferred to the target language, and the intralingual; ommission, addition, misselection of LF preposition, and redundancy.These types were based on the theory from Corder. The most frequent one was the intralingual category. Meanwhile, the interview guideline was derived from Richard’s theory of causes of errors. The cause of error in using English preposition was the ignorance of the rule restriction that the students performed in doing the writing activity. To conclude, the error in using English preposition was because of the students’ low of grammatical ability