The objective of the study was to find out how good the mastery on
absolute construction structure is, and to find out some errors made by the fifth
semester students of the English Department of Muhammadiyah University of
Purwokerto in Academic Year 2011/2012.
This type of descriptive study included 38 students as the samples from
169 of the population of the fifth semester students in academic year 2011/2012
by using proportional random sampling. A test of achievement was used to get the
data of the students’ mastery on absolute construction. To test the validity of the
instrument, the Pearson’s Product Moment was utilized, and the reliability of the
instrument was tested by using K-R20 formula. The data were analyzed both
through qualitative and quantitative techniques. The qualitative technique was
used to describe the kinds and the possible causes of errors, while the quantitative
technique was used to measure the mean and the level of the students’ error.
The results of the study were: (1) the number of students who had mastery
in constructing absolute construction was 52.6%, and the number of failed
students was 10.6% of the total number of the samples, (2) the average of
students’ mastery on absolute construction belonged to the category “fair”, in the
percentage of 56.84%, (3) 2.6% of the students were in category “very good”,
50% of the students were in category “good”, 36.8% of the students were in
category “fair”, and 10.6% of the students were in category “bad”, (4) the errors
were classified into malformation (78.44%), omission (14.65%), and addition
(6.89%), (5) the errors were caused by intralingual transfer. The students still
lacked mastery because absolute construction uncommonly appears in spoken
language so that they rarely use it in their daily lives.