The Study of L1 Interference on English Compositions Made by Eighth Graders

Abstract

This study is aimed to find out the kinds of lexical and grammatical errors
caused by L1 interference or negative transfer of the mother tongue in writing
compositions made by eighth grade students of SMP Negeri 13 Malang and
the frequency of occurrence of errors. The focus of this study was identifying,
describing, and classifying grammatical and lexical errors in students writing.
Therefore, descriptive qualitative was considered appropriate for the design of
the study. The subjects were 39 eighth grade students in 8A Class in the second
semester of 2008-2009 academic years. The instrument used to collect the data
was the students’ writing tasks. The result shows that there 586 errors resulting
from L1 interference were found from 78 compositions. Some categories of
errors in Kwary and Sugiri could not be applied to the data, such as, if clause,
embedded question, comparison, conjunction, and word class. No sentences
containing those categories of errors were found in the data. However, the
researcher developed another category of errors that are not mentioned in the
classification scheme by Kwary and Sugiri, that is, clause without subject that
makes up 2.56% of all errors.