The influence of learners’ mother tongue (L1) when they learn another language (L2) has been extensively researched on students of various disciplines such as English literature, economics, and other social sciences; however, not much has been conducted on those from the medical or health-related disciplines. The present study researched the influence of L1 (Indonesian) in the case of health professional students learning English.
Thirty four sample essays of 9,168 words long in total written by health professional students while sitting in two IELTS Preparation tests were analyzed. Only grammatical errors were investigated in this study. Errors found were classified under two taxonomies; linguistics category taxonomy and surface strategy taxonomy (Taylor, cited in Ellis 1994: 57). The errors were identified by means of detecting missing words, unnecessary added words, wrong choice of words and forms, and word orders. The identified errors were then categorized in terms of the source of the errors under psycholinguistic sources.
The total number of erroneous sentences found was 239, out of 639 sentences, consisting of one hundred and eighty six non-interference (77.83%) errors and fifty three interference errors (22.17%). These interference and non-interference errors showed the following distribution. The highest number of errors was in the use of verb forms (76) that accounted for 31.79 % of the total, followed by article (58) and noun errors (46), making up 24.26 % and 19.24 % respectively, prepositions (37) accounting for 15.48 %, modals (10) making up for 4.18 %, adjectives (8) that accounts for 3.34 %, and the lowest number of errors was in the use of adverbs (4) that makes up 1.67 % of all errors.
The interference errors mainly involved the use of articles and prepositions. Although the number of the interference errors in the erroneous sentences in this study (22. 17 %) may not be considered significant as compared to the EFL learners' overall essays, this does not mean that we need not worry about these errors. This evidence shows that L1 did play a negative role in the process of EFL learners' writing in English. This study suggests that the teaching of articles and prepositions in academic writing needs to be done more intensively in order to achieve better results. |