Abstrak
This research aimed to describe the form of language errors in the field of spelling and syntax in the descriptive compositions written by the Grade VII.9 students of SMPN 1 Tarakan. The study was considered as decriptive-qualitative research with the data in the form of words, clauses and sentences in the descriptive compositions written by the Grade VII.9 students of SMPN 1 Tarakan containing language errors in their writing compositions. The data were obtained from the descriptive compositions written by the Grade VII.9 students of SMPN 1 Tarakan in the academic year of 2020-2021. In this research, the data were analyzed using the basic Direct Element Sharing (DES) and further techniques, consisting of omission, substitution, and insertion techniques. The results showed that there were language errors in the descriptive compositions written by the Grade VII.9 students of SMPN 1 Tarakan. The results show that there were 207 errors, consisting of 73 capital letter writing errors, 27 writing errors on ku-, kau-, -ku, -mu, 60 preposition writting erros, 25 puncuation errors, 5 symbol writing errors, 3 excessive element use errors, 5 excessive superlative use errors, 5 double pluralization errors, and 4 excessive conjunction use errors. The errors with the gratest frequency occurred in writing the capital letters (73 errors), meaning that the students’ ability to understand how to write capital letters was still poor. Meanwhile, the smallest errors occurred in the excessive element use (3 errors).