Cycilia Novita Pengarang

The objectives of this research were to investigate how simple past tense used by students in narrative text writing and to identify the common error made by students' in using simple past in their narrative text based on Dulay's theory (focus on the surface strategy taxonomy), includes omission, addition, misformation and misordering. This research was conducted at SMAN 14 Tangerang. The subject of this research was the students of class X MIPA 5 which had 30 students. This research was designed in the form of qualitative research, especially in descriptive method. There was a topic that was prepared about narrative text "Cinderella", the students were asked to write narrative text based on the pictures. The result showed that the highest frequency of errors made by the students based on surface strategy taxonomy was omission error with 115 items (46%). Addition with 87 items (35%), misformation with 30 items (12%), misordering with 15 items (6%). The teachers are suggested to give much practice about the use of regular and irregular verb and the use of simple past tense in order to minimize the omission errors.