The title of this research paper is “Error Analysis of Using Tenses in Students’
Writing Composition”. It is written to be submitted to the English Department of
Pasundan University. This research explains about tenses errors, especially in past
tense. The participant of the study is eleven grade student at SMAN 1 Ciparay
academic year 2016/2017. The writer chooses this research because the writer
think that students in SMAN 1 Ciparay still weak in using tenses, they only
transfer Indonesian words to English without thinking about the time. Their
knowledge about tenses is not good enough. Therefore this research conducted to
give information to teachers about it. The method that the writer uses in this
research is descriptive qualitative method. The writer chooses this method
because the writer will analyze the group of human, object, condition, idea or a
phenonemnon. This method is used to describe a description about the relation of
related phenomenon systematically and accurately. In conducting this research,
descriptive method is considered suitable and appropriate for analyzing and
classifying something or fact. The writer does some steps in doing this research
those are planing, implementation, and reporting. The writer collects the data in
school, the writer ask the studentst to write composition (recount text about the
last vacation), then the data analyzed. The findings in this study clearly find that
many errors which produced by students’ in using Past Tense in their
composition. The writer found 257 sentences in student’s writing compositions.
The total number of errors was 137 in 104 sentences. That are 19 to be error, 111
verb error, and 7 form error. The students cannot differentiate between verb one
and verb two, they still using present form while it must be past tense. The total
percentage of error that the students made was 40,46%. The writer believes that
this number is not significant because it is less than 50%. Yet, this number of
40,46% can actually be minimized if the students know the English Tenses
especially past tense really well.
Key words: past tense, writing composition, recount tex